The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Read online

  MARK LAURENT (BLUE), HAWAII | THE GAMER

  Mark, better known among students as Blue, was hanging out with his usual friends at the arcade, their typical after-school activity. Well, “hanging out with” wasn’t exactly accurate. While the rest of the guys huddled around Street Fighter, Tekken, and Battle Gear (for which Blue held the machine record), Blue was absorbed in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. The others made fun of Blue for playing Tatsunoko, calling it a “button masher” because it involved only four buttons and a joystick. Blue was one of the few people he knew who could “see the beauty in the game.” The skill in Tatsunoko was to know when, where, and how to attack your opponent. Choosing combo breaks took precision, rhythm, and imagination. Gaming was an art, really; at least some games were. It just didn’t look that way from the outside.

  That was one of the reasons why last year, as a junior, Blue founded Arwing, Kaloke High School’s first gaming club. He wanted to change people’s minds about gaming—and gamers. He wanted to demonstrate that gaming had integrity and valor, that it could be elegant. He had no idea that the results would be disastrous.

  At first, Arwing thrived. One hundred seventy people signed up within weeks. Blue, as president, assigned his friends to the remaining officer slots and cajoled them to accompany him to a local senior citizens’ home to play Wii Sports with the residents. Blue made posters to advertise the club. One read, GAMING IS MAINSTREAM. GAMERS ARE MAINSTREAM. IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO ARE SURPRISED BY THIS THAT HAVE SUSPECT SOCIAL LIVES.

  Quickly Blue’s friends grew apathetic toward the club, as they were toward most things. They said they would build the Web site and then didn’t. They ruined an event because they didn’t hand out the promotional fliers for fear of looking “stupid.” One day at the mall, Blue was sitting with his friends when he put his head down on the table and fell asleep. When he woke up ten minutes later, they were gone. Thereafter, Blue’s friends started ditching him for fun—at the mall, at school. From their posts on Facebook and Twitter, Blue could see when they went out together, intentionally excluding him. He was closest with Jackson, who attended a neighboring school, but even Jackson was less likely to socialize with Blue unless Ty and Stewart were there, if not Herman and his two followers.

  Blue tried not to let this treatment faze him. He had become accustomed to social setbacks in middle school after his closest friend, who had nicknamed him Blue after a Pokémon trainer, moved away. Uninterested in the superficial chatter that dominated classmates’ typical middle school conversations, Blue turned to technology and other solitary pursuits. He discovered outlets such as speedrunning video games: beating a game as quickly as possible, from beginning to end. (He could beat Portal, a game that took decent players at least two hours to win, in twenty minutes.)

  Blue also expanded his offbeat interests. He listened to trance and shoegaze music and religiously watched Internet shows, machinima, and anime. He spent hours drawing, mostly Fox from Star Fox, as well as characters from other games. He liked Fox because, “When I see his image, I fill in the gaps: he’s heroic, skilled, caring, and has a lot of close friends that amplify his power as a hero.” Drawing led to photography. Blue loved the camera’s precise machinery and that it could evoke a memory or emotion that meant more than the camera itself. Eventually Flickr featured Blue on the front page. When he was in eighth grade, companies began paying him for stock use of his photos. For years, he sold about six contracts per month.

  Initially, Blue spent the money on computer parts and camera lenses. When he was fourteen, he bought a three thousand dollar car: a 1983 alpine white Audi Quattro. He couldn’t believe his find. The car was in excellent condition: no body damage, a pristine engine, low mileage. Nevertheless, Blue decided to take it apart and rebuild it. Since then, he’d been doing so regularly, starting over about every six months, dismantling the car and replacing every miniscule part, exchanging rubber bits for urethane pieces, making it better in every way he could. He hardly ever drove it, however. (Even now, he didn’t have a driver’s license.)

  The more Blue engaged in non-mainstream activities, the less he had in common with his classmates. He drifted among groups—jocks, skaters, punks—becoming friends with one person in a crowd and then assimilating into the rest of the group for a while. But he couldn’t seem to achieve a level of total comfort with anyone. As a result, he spent a lot of time at home on the Internet becoming, in his words, “a geek/otaku.”

  During his sophomore year, Blue met his current group of friends at a video game store where they gathered most days after school. At the time, Blue assumed the others were gamers like him; he didn’t discover until much later that they weren’t serious about gaming. He knew now that those friends were not the friends he was looking for—people who would understand Blue’s inner elegance the same way he could see the beauty behind Tatsunoko. He was sure, however, that senior year was too late to establish a new social circle.

  For months, Blue worked hard to organize a fundraising LAN (Local Area Network) party that would be Arwing’s signature event. Inspired by a video of DreamHack, “the world’s largest computer festival,” Blue envisioned a party with rows of hundreds of PCs, neon lights, strobes, live dance music, and people of all ages and types playing individually, gaming together.

  Blue labored tirelessly for months, lining up sponsors, locating equipment, and advertising and promoting the event. He gave a presentation to the PTA. He renamed his professional gaming tournament team after the club and won several competitions, racking up publicity and money. He worked hard to get the word out about the party. At least five hundred people were scheduled to attend.

  In the spring of Blue’s junior year, a Kaloke staffperson heard about Arwing. Concerned because she believed video games were a bad influence, she Googled Blue’s name and found his personal blogs, game records, photos, tags, forum posts, and other information. She printed them out, circled everything she interpreted negatively, and distributed the pages to other school employees. She told the principal that Blue was a pedophile and that the club was corruptive. She and Blue had never met.

  Mr. Pakaki, the Arwing advisor, showed Blue the pages the woman had submitted as evidence that Arwing could corrupt the school. These were some of the items the woman highlighted:

  “Kill count,” a gamer’s term, and Blue’s game statistics.

  The age on Blue’s MySpace page: 69. (“Hardy har har, I was like 13 when I made it,” Blue said later.)

  “Gamers at school,” a title of a blog post by a student Blue didn’t know who called the club “dorky.”

  A caption to one of Blue’s Flickr photos about “a pedo.” The line was an inside joke; Blue’s friend wanted to date an underclassman.

  A caption to a photo of the club: “woop woop.” (Blue could assume only that the woman wrongly thought “woop woop,” meant as a sarcastic cheer, was a sexual reference.)

  “First period teacher,” which was written on another student’s blog about nothing that had to do with Blue. This item stymied him.

  On the side of one of the printouts, the woman had written in large letters “BLUE IS MARK,” as if she had solved some giant mystery.

  At first, Blue didn’t believe there was a problem. The woman’s accusations were so ludicrous that he didn’t expect them to amount to anything. Then the principal called Blue and Mr. Pakaki into his office. Blue brought along Angelique, the club secretary, because she was articulate. The principal explained that it would be easier to terminate the club than fight the woman’s claims.

  Blue felt as if he were on trial. He and Angelique made their rebuttals, which were somewhat dampened by Arwing’s clueless advisor chiming in. Blue couldn’t stand Pakaki, who sometimes called students “trash” and “stupid” to their faces. The principal, whom Blue liked, was understanding and sympathetic. He proposed that Arwing could continue as long as he approved all of its online activities. This was okay with Blue; it was what the advisor did next, he said, that “sc
rewed it all up.”

  “We’re going to be extra careful from now on,” Pakaki said, then decided to illustrate obsequiously how extra careful he would be. “We won’t play anything on PC anymore.” Blue blanched. What was Pakaki doing? Forbidding PC use would take the serious gaming out of the gaming club.

  Immediately, the advisor restricted Arwing’s activities and yanked away Blue’s responsibilities. Pakaki even took over Blue’s LAN party. He disregarded Blue’s work, halting all advertising and prohibiting PCs, the draw for the majority of attendees. He refused to let students bring their own consoles. He renamed the party a “video game tournament” and changed the events to three games that true gamers didn’t play.

  Blue’s “epic LAN party,” the event he had planned for months, degenerated into ten students at a table under the fluorescent lights of the unadorned high school gym. Blue left after setting up the equipment. He couldn’t bear to watch. Many of the hundreds of people to whom Blue had advertised the party, unaware of the behind-the-scenes fiasco, blamed him for the failure.

  In late spring, Arwing held its officer elections. Thirty students showed up to submit secret ballots. Blue began to worry when Herman’s followers made their selections public. “Yeaahhh, Herman!” one yelled. “Herman gonna be president, awriiight!” the other echoed. Ty and Stewart abstained from voting.

  After the vote, Pakaki pulled Blue aside, as if the rest of the students wouldn’t hear their conversation from three feet away. “Mark, I want you to know that I voted for Herman because I think he needs it more than you.” Pakaki’s voice oozed faux compassion. “It’s something to put on his résumé for college.”

  Pakaki was known for playing favorites; apparently he had chosen to anoint Herman as president no matter the vote. Blue watched as Pakaki flipped through the ballots without bothering to count them formally. As Pakaki announced the new officers, Blue went numb. Blue’s club, the club that was supposed to start “a revolution in video gaming,” the club for which he had sacrificed schoolwork all semester, was stripped of its gaming. Blue, out. Herman, in. Herman, who didn’t even game in the first place.

  When Blue’s senior year began in August, he was more reserved than usual. Nobody asked what was wrong. His friends talked around him, tossing jabs at him now and then. So he wasn’t surprised when they made fun of him at the arcade.

  “Did you beat that guy on Tatsunoko yesterday?” Ty asked him.

  Herman sneered. “Oh, you mean that game that takes no skill—just mash buttons all day?”

  Herman’s followers laughed maniacally and chorused, “Ooo.”

  At home late that night, Ty invited Blue to chat online with him, Herman, and two other classmates. Blue dipped in and out of the conversation as he built a Nirvash, a miniature mechanical model of a robot from an anime. After a while, Blue threw inhibition to the wind and said what he had wanted to say all summer. “It’s ridiculous that the president of Arwing is somebody who doesn’t play video games,” Blue ranted, only half-joking. “He hasn’t done [jack] with the club.”

  Herman responded, “I like how you’re not even president material at all.”

  And Blue was done. Done with the conversation, done with Arwing, and done with Herman and his followers. Blue worried that Herman both represented and perpetuated the way their classmates perceived Blue and his club. He logged off and resumed sanding the Nirvash.

  Back in the spring, one of the posters that Blue had made to advertise Arwing displayed a group of gaming characters and announced, I’M NOT LONELY.

  But he was.

  WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH

  Before leaving home for her last first day of high school, Whitney glanced at herself in all of her mirrors for the seventeenth time: the large mirror above her dresser, the small one by her TV for scrutinizing hair and makeup, and the full-length one behind her door. She had spent two hours getting ready this morning. Her white-blonde hair, highlighted from a summer of lifeguarding, cascaded to her shoulders in meticulously crafted, loose, bouncy curls behind a funky knit headband that she wore so she’d have an excuse to brag that members of a famous rock group had complimented her on it. Several bracelets dangled from her wrist, still tan from cheerleading camp the week before. Her makeup was flawless, accentuated by a smattering of glitter above her eyes; it looked good now, but she knew she would check her makeup again in the school bathroom three or four times that day, hunting for imperfections and correcting them with her Sephora-only arsenal.

  People told Whitney all the time that she was pretty, as in beauty pageant pretty or talk show host pretty. Whitney thought this was because of her smile. In her opinion, her straight white teeth slightly made up for her body, which dissatisfied her when she compared it to her friends’. When they went to the local diner together, the girls did not eat; they only sat and watched the guys stuff their faces. If the girls were really hungry, the most they would order in front of the group was lemon water.

  Whitney checked her makeup again in the kitchen mirror, forced herself to guzzle a Slim-Fast shake to jump-start her metabolism, grabbed her Coach purse, lacrosse bag, and book bag, and ran out the door, pausing briefly at the mirror in the foyer. She drove too quickly into the school parking lot, unapologetically cutting off people on her way, and parked her SUV crookedly, taking up two spots, but leaving it there anyway because she could. She met up with Giselle, her best friend until recently. Giselle, who had been the schoolwide Homecoming Queen as a sophomore, had become popular through cheerleading and by dating a popular senior—when she was in the eighth grade. “Well, this is it!” Giselle said, and they stepped into the building.

  Riverland Academy, located in a small town in upstate New York, catered to a mostly white, Christian community. Its four hundred students crowded into the gym, standing in small groups or lining the bleachers. Amidst the chaos, the girls easily spotted their group, which other students called the “preps” or the “populars,” in the center of the gym. Bianca, the queen bee, thin and tan, stood with Kendra, a senior; Peyton, a junior; and Madison, Bianca’s best friend. Chelsea, the only brunette standing among the populars, had worked her way up from “being a loser,” according to Whitney, by “sucking up to Bianca like crazy and giving her information about people.” The preps tolerated Chelsea, but didn’t include her as a stalwart member of the group. This meant they didn’t allow her in their Homecoming limo, but they did invite her to take pictures with them.

  A few of the prep boys orbited the girls: Chip and Spencer, hot high-society seniors; Bobby, a chubby, boisterous football star; and Seth, an overachieving junior. The preps were each on two or more sports teams, partied with college students, and in Whitney’s words, “just own[ed] the school.”

  The girls appraised the surrounding students and whispered to each other, standing as they typically did, one hand on a hip, one knee bent, in what the cheerleading coach referred to as “the hooker’s pose.” Their long hair hung stick straight. They wore heels and dark skinny jeans. Whitney was the only one not dressed in what she called “country club urban prep,” with which she had masked herself through the end of junior year. Whitney’s group wore Guess and H&M when they weren’t wearing designers, saving their splurges for shoes and makeup. They wore only certain cosmetics—MAC, Smashbox, Too Faced, Nars—and designer perfume and accessories. Their clothes rarely ranged beyond cream, black, and a dark green that matched Bianca’s eyes. They expected each other to dress the same way and to tan frequently at the local salon. Only Bianca was allowed to wear anklets.

  Madison, Chelsea, and Kendra squealed and hugged Whitney and Giselle, as if they hadn’t seen each other three days earlier at a small exclusive party Whitney threw for her group. Bianca air-kissed them on both cheeks, as was her custom. The preps skeptically eyed Whitney’s outfit, which she had planned weeks ahead of time: a flowing seafoam empire-waist Anthropologie top and bell-bottom jeans. Rather than conform to the group this year, Whitney was determined to ex
ert her independence by wearing her favorite styles.

  “Dirty hippie!” Madison shouted.

  “Wow, that’s a bit much, don’t you think?” Giselle told Whitney. You didn’t say that when we were alone, but now that you’re in front of the group, you do, Whitney thought. Giselle continued, “You look like a clown with too much makeup on!” Everyone laughed, including Whitney.

  The group caught up briefly before resuming the assessment of the students swarming around them. “Oh my God. Who is that?!” Peyton sniffed, nodding her head toward a band girl.

  “That’s Shay,” Chelsea answered.

  “Dude, I didn’t even recognize her,” Peyton said. “Did she gain like fifteen pounds over the summer?! Why did her hair get so big and frizzy?” This led to a discussion about how there were too many skanks and trailer trash kids at Riverland.

  The preps took stock of the new freshmen, as they did at the beginning of every year, to decide who was going to be cool and to whom they were going to be mean. They automatically deemed one girl cool because her older sister was dating a prep. The freshman cheerleaders were acceptable. If freshman girls didn’t already have something going for them when they got to Riverland—an older boyfriend, a popular sibling, a varsity sport, money, or a parent with connections—they were out of luck. “If we don’t know them already by some other affiliation,” Whitney said, “they aren’t worth getting to know”—and they were automatically labeled skanks.

  The prep guys had an even clearer classification system. Only the ninth-grade football players who served as the seniors’ “bitches” were granted cool status. These were the boys whom the senior preps could order to throw out their lunch trays or buy them chips in the snack line. “Basically,” Whitney explained later, “those freshmen are, like, building up their popularity by sucking up to popular kids, so when they are our age, they’re popular and can do this to other freshmen.”

  Students gathered together in the bleachers, group by group. The “badasses,” allegedly bullies who liked to destroy property, were tossing basketballs in the air. The FFAs, or members of the Future Farmers of America club—the preps called them hicks and rednecks—sat at the end of the bleachers. The wannabes, dressed like their role models but discernible by their whiff of uncertainty, stood at a far corner of the room. Those were the kids who fed the preps’ egos. Whitney would walk down the hall like royalty, while the wannabes would gush, “Whitney, you look so pretty today!” or “Whitney, you did such a good job cheering last night!” If a prep girl showed up at school with a shaved head, Whitney was sure the wannabes would visit the salon that night to do the same. It was the fact that they tried so hard that doomed them.