Location: GI Joe Adventure Team Headquarters

It’s a cliché that we geeks tend to collect action figures, spend hours on role-playing games, and hate mainstream activities such as sports and drinking.

Except for the drinking, I’m guilty as charged. NCAA what?  Oh, I’m too busy reading the new catalog from one of the GI Joe clubs…I am a geek, proudly, utterly, completely.  I have long ago embraced my inner geek.

And academia, where geeks abound and rule the roost, is my home. Aside to readers: geeks will tell you, proudly, we are not nerds. Nerds pretend to have knowledge, like the fools Socrates denounced.  Geeks, on the other hand, actually know something, even if it is as obscure as the history of Topper Tigers action figures or the finer points of John Donne’s use of metaphor.

Now, a year on in Second Life, I have quite a bit of geek-knowledge of this invented world.  Lately it occurs to me that our avatars serve exactly the same purpose that my GI Joes and Major Matt Masons did in my (as yet continuing) childhood.  Despite the idea that our “Joes” were not “dolls” who played dress-up like Barbie, we engaged in the same activities. True, we tended to play “Japanese prison camp” instead of “Ken and Barbie go riding in the pink Corvette” but the impulses were the same. We made up stories as we interacted with other kids and their action figures.  At least one neighborhood girl joined the fun, and her Barbie wisely dumped Ken for GI Joe (as did my wife’s Barbie—a sure sign that I had to marry the woman).

In Second Life we buy items for our avatars in the same way we’d buy Barbie a pants-suit or GI Joe a Bazooka.  We revel in our avatars’ inventories, just as we made sure that GI Joe’s footlocker was well stocked for any emergency.

Sadly, research by demographers and marketers show fewer children are playing with traditional toys, and they are doing so for shorter periods of time.  With that goes much imaginative, freeform play in which children invent a world for their toys, making up stories and negotiating rules. I realize that some of my and my friends’ adventures with GI Joe would have today’s hyper-involved, overly worried parents sending us to a psychologist: “NO! Today YOUR GI Joe gets buried up to his neck in sand by Colonel Yamanaka!”

Yet we survived this type of play and lead productive lives.  For today’s children, though, I am not as gloomy as some who write about childhood.  With their avatars in games and virtual worlds, the old story-making urge remains alive.  And we play in these virtual sandboxes with others, just as kids once did in the backyard.  As much as I want children to be outdoors more now, I at least feel that their creativity will survive, if parents will stop over-programming their lives and give them time to just PLAY, with physical toys or an avatar.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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