Last decade’s nerd is today’s mainstream gamer

I’ve been watching some of these interviews with Richard Garriott as he talks about Shroud of the Avatar and he made a very interesting point about computers and gaming. When I was a teen and first started working on computers and playing games, it wasn’t considered a cool thing to do. In fact people like me were shunned for our activities. Nerd was used as a badge of shame. And heaven forbid someone mention D&D. That was the devil’s work and playing such things was akin to open a portal to Hell itself! D&D was mind control turning our young into Satan’s minions.

Now, D&D, gaming and computers are multi-billion dollar industries. People now play computer games professionally. There are tournaments for just about every game imaginable. D&D has become common place and games like Diablo sold millions of copies because of it. People spend paychecks and build entire rooms around the concept of playing games on an Xbox.

It’s astounding how far we’ve come and that the shame of my high school years has become so mainstream that we don’t even think about it anymore.

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