After a two-week run at the top of the box office and over $300 million in ticket sales, the new Star Wars film, “Attack of the Clones”, seems ready to settle in for a long and profitable summer. The future is less certain, however, for avid fans of the series, some of whom waited in line for weeks in order to be among the first to see the new film. These “Star Wars Geeks”, or SWG’s, know every story line, every character, and every nuance from the each of the popular films. They can recite lines and act out scenes on command. And now, their nerd-ridden talents may have to sit dormant until the final Star Wars film is released – sometime in 2004.
“I’m not sure what to do now” said SWG Andy Howard “I am such a geek, but now that the ‘Attack of the Clones’ hype has died down, I’m going to have to find another way to express it.” Before the movie opened, Howard and his friends would spend hours trying to move pencils by using “The Force”, or battling each other with yardsticks while making “light saber” noises. Now, says Howard, “those things are still fun, but just not as fun as they were before.” To fill the void, some SWG’s have turned to Dungeons and Dragons, a complicated board game that is popular with nerds, while others consider rubber stamp collecting or scale-model building. Howard and his friends, however, are still searching for a suitable outlet for their geeky behavior. “We’re all going to a pottery class at the community college next week, and we are very hopeful that we will love it”, said Aaron Capshaw, a friend of Howard.
More thoughtful SWG’s, such as Stephen Billing, are actually creating new outlets for geeky behavior. Billing, a thirty-seven year old customer support representative, and his friends have invented a new game that they call “Metric Mania”. Players must convert traditional measures, such as miles or yards, into metric measures. The player that converts data the fastest is rewarded with pieces to a magazine picture. Once a player gathers enough pieces, their reward is being able to look at the complete photo, usually a naked woman or a large computer system. Billing and his friends usually play “Metric Mania” in the basement of Stephen’s parent’s suburban Philadelphia home, where Stephen lives. He hopes to introduce his game to the world, however, and is shopping “Metric Mania” to several geeky companies, such as board-game giant Hasbro, Inc.
All SWG’s agree, however, that they are simply buying time until the final Star Wars picture is released. “All the geeky things that we do in our normal lives are nothing compared to what happens when Mr. Lucas releases a Star Wars film”, said Billings as he munched on a Fruit Roll-up. “It’s like how excited jocks get when the Super Bowl comes along. I guess you could say that for people like me, Star Wars is like the Super Bowl, World Series, and Olympics combined into one thermonuclear ball of energized excitement. Like, remember when the Death Star was finally destroyed? That was definitely cooler than any stupid home run or touchdown. Definitely cooler”. |
