Some of you who know me might think of this as a veiled attempt to link some new-ish Korean pop that my friend Amber sent to me. You may be right, but I do have a point behind doing it besides making your eyes bleed with cute. Really!
Note: Not responsible for any catchiness that gets in your head. Like I’d think that was a negative thing!
At any rate, my point in this was to expand a bit about what reader Bede talked to me about in yesterday’s comments in response to my MMO cynicism post. Bede talks a little bit about how looking at MMOs in a default “good” light is a different way of looking at things rather than in a default “bad” or “fail” one. It really got me to thinking that on the flipside of the whole idea of how geek culture perceives MMOs, games, and other new-fangled shiny, that you don’t see many people excited enough to keep up a good, encouraging attitude about things that they like. More often than not, the kind of cheerleading that has the saccharine sweetness of the young women in the video above is absent. It’s present only in the kind of one-liner or one-paragraph initial “omg excitement” you see in response to something that looks cool, or worse yet, is outlawed among the “cool kids” of geek society as being straight up foolish idealism, otherwise known as “being a fanboy/girl”.
I honestly don’t understand what’s wrong with cheerleading something that you are excited about, especially in geek nation, where sweet new stuff always presents itself all the time. There are a lot of reasons why something that someone likes may later turn out to be something that isn’t expected, but why dampen spirits? A trailer, a sneak peek, a bunch of images, a neato website…all of these things are, in some respects, meant to generate buzz, excitement, and the kind of “rah-rah” for the creators of such things that motivates them. Let people have misguided expectations if they want to have them, I say.
Besides, cheerleading for things isn’t necessarily limited to being constantly talkative about how good something is, how the latest MMO is going to be a blast to play or the latest device is going to change the way you do things. People cheerlead things in geekery all the time without even really realizing they are doing it. Any focused-interest blog dedicated to a particular game, or item, or interest is in a way cheerleading it by merit of the fact that it’s by nature a homage to the things about it. Any fan-created media like a video, or art, or even a real-life picture having to do with it, is also an implicit cry of support. Geeks create things every day that are a nod to something they like or think is relevant to their interests, and with that kind of flattery, how can it not be wrong ti stifle such creativity with a little too much of the “down-to-earth”?
More than anything, geeks show passion about the things they are interested in. Reducing or discouraging that just kind of makes our entire culture just a little bit more boring. Frankly, I’d rather have a little bit of excitement over the same old attitude any day.