Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

There’s no denying it: I’m a nerd. And there’s no denying it: you are too. But sometimes there are those junctures in your life where you stop and think “I’ve just taken this to a whole new level”. So what I want to know is what are the actions that lead to that realization?

My most recent one: with the advent of the Mac Pro, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in XP playing The Sims 2. I admit, I like to build houses. But a transcendental moment of nerdery was reached when I started scouring back issues of Met Home for inspiration.

It may have also been when I thought that this would be an ideal tool for mocking up a house before taking it to an architect.

The other day I had a brief phone conversation about video games:

X: “So yeah, my friend is really into video games.”
Me: “Cool.”
X: “He thinks Mario Galaxy is the best game ever!”
Me: sighs

Over and over I hear about how amazing Super Mario Galaxy is. Seriously.

But I wonder if those people have played the same game that I’ve played; my copy is definitely lacking in the “super” territory. Graphics and sound are good, but not mind-blowing; am I supposed to lower my standards because this is a Wii game? Story is… well, it’s the same basic story that we’ve seen in Mario games since the 80’s. Except that was never really a story. Controls get some points for being better than Super Paper Mario, but I could’ve had just as much fun with a more conventional controller.

But I feel like I’ll be chastised if I say that Mario Galaxy isn’t all that. I was really excited about Mario Sunshine when that came out, and it turned out to be pretty average. Galaxy is not some amazing revolution in storytelling or graphics or sound, and the controls are gimmickry at their finest. Yet Metacritic shows an average score of 97/100.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m no longer a subscriber to the Nintendo school of gaming. I’ve certainly enjoyed my share, and maybe I’ll pick up the new Mario Kart at some point, but I can’t think of a recent game of theirs that I want to play and keep playing. Perhaps I will plod through the rest of Galaxy, but at the same time I’ve been thinking about just ditching the Wii altogether.

Bear with me; I’m going to head back to theatre-nerd reference land for a minute. I mentioned a few times that I was just in Gypsy, a show about a young girl who is pushed into burlesque and stripping by her overzealous, fame-seeking mother. There’s an exchange in the show between one of the strippers at the theater and the daughter in which the daughter explains that she “can’t be a stripper because she has no talent.” To which the stripper responds, “to be a stripper all you need to have is no talent.”

To be a designer all you need to have is no talent. Stop and think about that for a second. How many terrible designers do you know? People that have no artistic skill whatsoever but still manage to extract the dollars from desperate clients who don’t know that there’s a better act just down the street.

Near the end of the show, the daughter has accepted stripping and become quite famous for it. She makes a statement during her act about being an “ecdysiast”, or one who sheds its skin, and exclaiming that “at these prices, I’m not a stripper; I’m an ecdysiast!”

With that in mind, there are plenty of truly talented designers out there, and as is often the case, they have higher rates. But at the same time, you’ll find designers charging like they’re ecdysiasts when they’re not, and vice versa. Such is life on the internerd: anybody can claim to be anything.