Not sure how much power this would reveal, not sure I care... When I was a kid, my family lived overseas in a second or third world country for decades and was there well after I became an adult. Most kids were either jocks or geeks, though there were a few that were both. Access to geek stuff was limited and there was a finite supply. I think I was in first grade when my best friend at the time and I saw his older brother had AD&D books and wanted to play the game. We had to blackmail friend's brother with threats of telling their parents about older brother smoking to read the books. We eventually got our own game going and had fun with it and, when one of us had a friend going to Singapore, we got our own books and a copy of the "pocket" version of Car Wars, which older brother and his friends kept begging to play with us and we let them play it as much as they had us play with them - NEVER!
There were four different D&D groups going on in our compound and they were very much their own cliques. The only time there was any mixing was when a group's DM was sick or their family left the country. We knew who was in each group and despite enjoying the same game/games it was like the Sharks and Jets from Westside Story or Romeo and Juliet. The only time we acknowledged each other's presence was common defense when being bullied. Nobody would personally interfere, but any of us geeks were getting beat, some other geek would find the person who wanted a piece of the person doing the beating and sic them on each other while the normies would just cheer. We could "hate" each others guts, but we absolutely knew it could just as easily be us on the receiving end so we stopped it when we could. I guess my main point is that geek/gaming culture was insular then. We dealt with enough shit from parents about our supposedly satanic hobby. We would have NEVER invited someone in that we didn't all already know and trust. There were plenty of stories floating around about some new person joining a group, stealing books or dice from the group, and then running to another group. I mentioned there were some crossover geek/jocks, they were secretly part of one group or another and would run interference for the other members of their group - if they knew someone out to beat up a gamer, they'd steer them to some other group's member rather than one of their own.
I got into BattleTech in high school (boarding school stateside) and was the only person I knew who wanted to actually build and paint minis instead of being satisfied with cardboard cutouts, so I blew a lot of time and cash on lead (later Rallidium, pewter, and plastic) and paint. I didn't get to play a lot of BattleTech then, but many years later a coworker saw my minis and appreciated the effort I put into minis so dragged me to play 40K with him. I bought and built some Boyz, put them together and had some fun. I played with that friend for a while and we started hanging out at the local hobby store for pick up games, which was fun for a while until some asshole refused to play with me because I used model railroad flocking for bases instead of the official Games Workshop flocking, then he began yelling about how I wasn't using official paints and some of the parts for my customized miniatures weren't official GW miniature bits. I was politely informed by the shop owner I would not be allowed to play there until I could field an army that was built of nothing but officially sanctioned and recognized parts. I left, said "Fuck it" to tabletop gaming, and dove back into video gaming even harder.
So, in response to OP on the gaming/geekdom/normie thread, I must disagree with your points. Geek stuff was a lot of fun when there was only a few of us, even if we had to fight to exist. Gaming was fun playing casually with other gamers, even if I enjoyed it in different ways than everyone else I was playing with. Once I experienced tabletop gaming gone mainstream to the point there were recognized events that were more to push a product than have fun to the point that I was exiled for having unique minis (that looked much better than the cookie cutter armies the other guys were playing with) because they were not 100% sold by the game's publisher the hobby wasn't much fun anymore.
I started PC gaming on an old XT and saw that hobby get fucked over by mainstream popularity where it's more viable and profitable for a "game" to be sold half finished as a live service with fucking lootboxes and excessive monetization. I would (figuratively) kill for either of these to go back to being niche hobbies focused on having fun more than pushing numbers, moving product beyond what the market could bear, and monetizing beyond anything reasonable, but I'm sure there's probably some other cow thread about all this shit somewhere else on the farms.
