Comment on The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the sports related communities.

• the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Personally I have no love for sports but my partner does we are both quite far left so I don’t think that really has anything to do with it.

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• Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  and that a lot of leftists don’t like sports at all

  Is that your experience per se, or have most of the leftists you’ve seen been nerds, and you’re just noticing the much more well-documented trend of nerds disliking sport?

  Personally I happen to be the kind of nerd who loves sport. My favourites are triathlon (and its constituent sports) and HEMA, but I also like professional spectator sports cricket and rugby league.

  HEMA’s a bit of an odd one since it tends to attract nerds more than people who are fans of more traditional sports. When I skip training to watch a big game of league, I definitely get light-hearted but at least somewhat sincere “sportsball” comments from regulars who like doing HEMA but aren’t interested in other “normal” sports. But my other sporting interests are far more conventional. This, while being a software engineer by trade, and also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days), real-time strategy games, and…well, being on Lemmy.

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  • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days

    pffffffffffffffft, those aren’t even nerdy. Those are like bringing kraft cheddar to a fancy cheese party and saying you’re a connoisseur. Let me know when you want to break out the real nerd braggadocio and start in on the fan-made white wolf spinoffs, or the burning wheel good times.

    ;)

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    • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      fan-made white wolf spinoffs

      Damn. I did buy a copy of V5 back before the pandemic because someone was going to start up a game that I was pretty excited to be in. Unfortunately that went by the wayside and I’ve so far never gotten to play any World of Darkness games.

      The nichest RPG I’ve played was probably “End of the World”, where the premise is you play as yourself, arriving at your regular RPG night, and just as you get started, the apocalypse starts. Awesome premise. Fucking terrible mechanics. Do not recommend that system.

      Actually, that’s not quite true. I did once play a home-made system someone else at my table created. But it wasn’t particularly inspired in my opinion, and didn’t do anything very interesting you couldn’t do with a little tweaking of PbtA.

      d20 fantasy is my main thing that I keep returning to, but I’ve had plenty of other RPG experience ;)

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      • GoodLuckToFriends@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Alright, I give you the nerd credit. I’m just depressed because I found out there was a group starting a game in my theater troupe, but they’d capped it at 5 and I was too late. I’d even take D&D right now.

        The end of the world sounds fun. I’d bet it would be a blast to throw that wrench in ‘session zero’ of a fate game (which is my personal favorite, even the prometheus and werewolf games don’t match up).

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  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I did qualify my entire comment with:

    It’s just been my experience that…

    So yes. And most of the nerds I’ve met lean right, not left. The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science.

    I do know a pair of right-leaning philosophy students though they claim to feel like outliers in a program that’s an outlier (the other way) at a school that’s mostly STEM programs.

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    • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science

      Sure, maybe. I’ll point out that there’s a known statistical trend of more highly-educated people being more left-leaning, but I’ll leave that discussion there, because it’s not actually the point.

      I didn’t actually say anything about nerds being leftists. I said that nerds are anti-sport. And that Lemmy is made up of nerds. Both of which, I hope, are not controversial statements. Not that Lemmy is made up of a representative cross-sample of nerds, but that of the users who are on Lemmy, most are nerds. My conjecture is that the reason you see a dislike for sport on Lemmy is not because Lemmings are left-wing, but because they’re nerds. And that if you were to control for political belief, Lemmy would still have a stronger anti-sport bias than the general public. While if you controlled for “nerdiness”, Lemmy’s anti-sport bias would be relatively weaker. Not an easy experiment to perform in practice, unfortunately.

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      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I think even if you exclude all nerds, you’ll find that sports fans lean right. Nerds, left or right, tend to be anti-sport, though that’s basically by definition (a nerd being a person whose hobbies skew intellectual rather than physical).

        That’s not the only way to define a nerd however. Another definition I’ve heard is based on the level of obsessiveness a person has with their hobby. In that world I would consider most of the biggest sports fans to be nerds. Think about how much time they spend looking at stats, talking about strategies, trades, drafts, listening to radio and podcasts, etc. All of that is very much in common with how video game nerds engage with their interest.

        I consider myself a nerd who loves both sports and video games (RPGs, Roguelikes, fighting games, RTS). However unlike many sports fans and athletes, I’m not religious or superstitious.

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