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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWhat better way to celebrate all things geek in anticipation of Comic Con International in San Diego this week than to learn a thing or two from certified geek\u2014he did pass our quiz, after all\u2014Wil Wheaton. We asked The Wil Wheaton Project host to define what it means to be a geek and found out why it\u2019s cool to not be that cool. For the record, we think Wheaton is pretty cool.\n\nGQ: Define geek.\n\n Wil Wheaton: I use &amp;quot;nerd&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;geek&amp;quot; interchangeably\u2014I don\u2019t make a distinction. I\u2019ve said that being a nerd is not about what you love, it\u2019s about the way that you love it. So you can be a nerd for football, and obsessively follow stats and player trades and figure out things that give you an advantage in, like, sports betting and things like that. Or, you can love Battlestar Galactica and try to work out all of the complex mythologies and get into things like blueprints of the ships. And then you can love things like Agents of Shield and Winter Soldier, and love that so much that you end up going to a comic book shop and then reading all the way back through ten or twenty years of Captain America comics. Someone who I would describe as a &amp;quot;geek&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;nerd&amp;quot; is a person who loves something to its greatest extent, and then looks for other people who love it the same way, so they can celebrate loving it together.\n\nHave you always owned the &amp;quot;geek&amp;quot; label, or did it take time to accept?\n\n When I was in elementary school, it was really hurtful when kids called me that. Because I knew that I was different. I knew that I was awkward. I knew that I wasn\u2019t coordinated. I knew that I wasn\u2019t athletic. And I knew that I was bookish. I didn\u2019t excel at the things that, in 1977, mattered on the playground. And, you know, I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That\u2019s just part of survival, right? Predator animals don\u2019t survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals. So we have to teach our kids, and we have to live by example, to not be terrible. It probably wasn\u2019t until I was a freshman in high school and I met the people who became my gaming group that I finally found people who were weird like I was, that loved reading and playing games and not just watching a science fiction or fantasy movie, but talking all about it.\n\nIt\u2019s one of the big reasons that a lot of my peers in the entertainment industry that were the same age as me, that were really famous and stuff when we were younger, went on to self-destruct: they didn\u2019t have the same grounding influence in their lives that I had with my friends and my board games and weekly screenings of Monty Python movies and epic D&amp;amp;D campaigns. That really just kept me out of what could have been a bad place. Because I was in the same kind of, like, existential pain and confusion that kind of comes with being a young actor that also comes with being a teenager\u2014I escaped it in a way that wasn\u2019t harmful to me.\n\nIs it cool to be a geek now?\n\n I wouldn\u2019t say that it\u2019s cool. I would say that it\u2019s accepted. And it feels accepted. But I\u2019m basically a professional nerd and I\u2019m still not cool. I\u2019m around people who are cool sometimes, and I know I\u2019m not them. But that\u2019s OK; I don\u2019t care."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/wil-wheaton-definition-geek-nerd>