All hobbies are "dorky" in a way (maybe except sports-related hobbies like hiking), they're considered especially so if one is obsessive about this hobby. Non-art hobbies, in my experience, are more likely to be classified "nerdy" as opposed to "dorky". I should note that, at least in the US for people in mid 20s, in the last few years (maybe thanks to Covid) "dorky" or "nerdy" sort of stopped being pejorative. Even in dating apps, it's normal for people to write stuff like "the dorkies things about me is... thinking about programming/gaming/drawing all the time" etc.

I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.

Sports are / can be massively nerdy tbh, some of them crunch more numbers and statistics than the average Eve Online spreadsheet warrior. And the bigger fans cosplay to the sports conventions.

Also, there's Football Manager, which takes the 'playing football' game out of the game.

Yeah, that football manager is still catergorised as a game is hilarious. I think I may have even developed a appreciation of the finer aspects of the modern games use of data analysis.

But I do find something attractive about games that keep someone's brain active. Never played factorio though my colleagues wax lyrical about it ad nauseum.

Football Manager once got described as being a game whose gameplay seems to have been inspired by accounting software.

Think I've completed that circle by suggesting to a friend working on accounting SaaS that he look at FM as UX inspiration...

Sports players and fantasy sports players live in different universes. Almost zero overlap.

Gaming is the most common hobby there is for males. And that includes men who do a lot of sport. They regularly happen to be gaming a lot. School drop outs game a lot.

Non nerds and non dorks have hobbies, always had. Having hobbies is quite normal and used to be normal. And frankly, playing computer games was popular among popular young boys for whole generations now.

"Dorky", "nerdy" never really described average gamer. It described small groups of people who had social issues regardless what they did - including sport.

I think some of us older folks have a hard time shaking the notion that gaming is nerdy. When I was a kid, you didn't tell people you played video games. Today it's a streamed e-sport in which people make huge sums of money. The transition was, I think, surprisingly fast and very unexpected back then.

As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.

Certain types of games, like factorio and eve online, are firmly nerd games. We make jokes in grand strategy game circles about how few not "traditional nerds" play these games. I still have not seen proof of a SINGLE woman who plays grand strategy games.

These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.

> I still have not seen proof of a SINGLE woman who plays grand strategy games.

We exist. We generally are not motivated to provide proof that we exist, especially because many requests for proof are expected in the form of "SEND NUDES". That was not implied in your comment, but your experience likely consists of this exchange and mine reflects a universe of incredulity and harassment.

If you gain insight from reading this, great. But that's not why I'm replying. Somewhere reading this thread is a girl in high school or a woman in college who's into grand strategy, or programming, or something else that's "uniquely intellectual". She's heard messages all her life that girls and women aren't the kinds of people who do this stuff. I know this because I've been that girl - going back decades to where I would read "I'm pretty sure there are no 12 year old girls using Linux", at age 12, from my dual boot Fedora/Debian machine.

Sis, you matter, even if you're just starting to get into this. If we only look at gaming, I've had thousands of hours across Factorio, Paradox games, Zachtronics games, and study sims (not to mention - gasp - mass market tactics games), but you can't get to hour #1000 without hour #1. Whether you choose to keep a low profile in nerd spaces or you choose to be a Girl Gamer (TM) lightning rod, I'm glad you're here, and I hope you pay more attention to comments like mine than the one above mine.

This particular game is very nerdy.