[Kromm]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There's a complex tradeoff between "X doesn't care about Status as much as about that peculiar hobby" and "X's having that hobby is evidence of being high enough in standing to have that sort of hobby."

It's very, very complex, in part because it depends on the observer as much as the hobbyist. As is my custom, I'll use myself as an example. I have three main hobbies, and here are my experiences with them:

Argentine Tango: People whose "knowledge" comes from bad popular media straight-up say, "That's a rich person's dance," as those media depict tango as a world of men in tuxes and women in gowns, in fancy ballrooms. Thus, the badly informed assume I have pretensions to a rarified lifestyle. People whose knowledge comes from dance science, dance theory, ethnochoreology, etc. are aware that Argentine tango has its origins in slave culture and slums, that it still has a lot of "the street" in it, that it's often danced in grimy clubs, and that the ballroom tango the media loves to depict isn't even the same dance. They tend to class me with struggling artists and the demimonde – as shady, even sleazy. And people who actually dance Argentine tango know that it appeals to a vertical cross-section of society, from poor to extremely rich, and that dancing it means only that this dance appeals to you more than others. Of course, there are tango dancers who put on airs, or starve for their art, or are slimy and looking only to pick up someone for the night, but all together they're a drop in a very large bucket.

Mixology: Many people, upon seeing the shelves full of bottles and tools in my home bar, utter something like, "It must be nice to have money to throw around." A few identify costly or hard-to-come-by bottles and figure I display them to show off; i.e., they're status symbols. Those who know me better are aware that aside from gifts, most of that stuff was paid for by me not going out to bars like most cocktail-drinkers (each night skipped pays for one or even two bottles!), not having a car, not having a TV, and having a strange lifestyle in general; a few see these "sacrifices" as signs that I'm not well off and of lower social status. I've even had comments that a home bar must mean I'm an alcoholic, on a fast slide to the bottom of the heap! But my fellow amateur mixologists know that there are rich mixologists who tour the world and poor ones who make do with a couple of bottles after working for minimum wage all day – and that on that scale, I'm pretty much dead average. Of course, there are snobs who show off their $1,000 whisky and drunks who try to pass off alcoholism as a hobby, but they're not most mixologists.

Roleplaying Games: The majority reaction is insulting – comments about living in my parents' basement, having a "neckbeard," having no social life, and maybe worshipping Satan. These commentators don't care about my social standing because they accord me what GURPS calls a Social Stigma . . . though in real life, social stigmas are taken as coding for low social status, because the stigmatized are often blocked from upward mobility. The minority who know games either realize that I'm mainly a GURPS person and throw out a quick, "Eew, GURPS! It's full of math!", which is effectively a way of placing me lower down the social ladder among gamers, or realize that I'm an employee of a games publisher and accord me a position high up the social ladder among gamers. Only a minority within the minority realize that I'm a middle-class dude with other interests, and that gaming isn't any weirder than fantasy football or a more interactive form of the fantasy a TV series represents. Of course, there are games writers who walk on their fans, and gamers who are addicted to gaming and letting their life disintegrate, but they don't typify the hobby.

PS: I use myself as an example to avoid sounding judgmental of others, as my personal belief is that if I want to analyze the motivations of real-life people, my life is the only one I have the right to dissect. Yet I'll bet that at least one reader believes that some of my comments above were made to "show off" – that is, to showcase my Status or desired Status. It doesn't matter that I know I didn't say any of those things for that reason; that person knows I did . . . which further drives home my point.