This question became very relevant to me as I entered graduate school. I found myself juggling three separate identities: my personal self, my professional self, and my gamer self.

The gaming community makes this easy to do; at the open game night near my home, people often begin exchanging resources before they exchange names. At times, I appreciate the structured and relatively impersonal nature of these interactions. I like people, but I’m fairly introverted, and when I started school, my social energy meter was sometimes completely depleted by the time I left for the day. Gaming was often a social outlet that allowed me to set my personal self aside.

The Twist

My work spoke for itself, they said, but traditional interviewers didn’t know what to make of my offbeat personality. My professors gave me a short list of interviewing skills to work on, but the consensus seemed to be that trying to fake “normality” would just come across as insincere.

I realized that conventional advice on being a successful psychology student wasn’t always going to work for me. I needed advice on being a successful misfit. Fortunately for me, I knew dozens of people who could help me with that. I just needed to start asking.

As it turned out, this was something I should have done from the beginning. I received guidance from others in the Magic judge community, began seeking out other geeky academics, and started running my ideas past the Magic crowd as a whole. Between support from the gaming community and a supervisor who encouraged us to bring in out-of-the-box therapy ideas, I slowly became more comfortable with letting my different selves blend.

The geek-influenced therapy programs, writing, and dissertation ideas that resulted began drawing attention—at the end of this school year, far from the dejected outsider I’d felt like the year before, I had an offer from my top-choice practicum site and a contract with my top-choice dissertation advisor. So what happened?

Social Networks

“Weak ties,” on the other hand, are acquaintances whom you talk to only to share resources and information (Wellman, qtd. in Kavanaugh et al. 120). You probably have weak ties at your local game store and at other nearby stores. Classmates and coworkers are also considered weak ties if you rarely interact beyond the functions of school or work (Kavanaugh et al. 120). If you talk to other players at big events or spend a lot of time online, you may have weak ties all over the world. Twitter is an especially good source for forming new ones because of the emphasis on what you have to say rather than who you are (Virk 20). It’s totally normal to follow somebody on Twitter because he or she has said something especially insightful, even if neither of you has ever heard of the other before (Virk 19).

Weak Ties and Resources

Weak ties have been found to be surprisingly important (Granovetter 201). Although you might expect your close social circle to be the most influential, it turns out that weak ties are critical for the flow of information (Granovetter 202). If you’re relying on your small community of strong ties, you’re all going to have approximately the same contacts and the same information. But when you tap into your weak ties, you’re opening up whole new resource-filled frontiers (Granovetter 202).

For example, a commenter on one of my articles mentioned that a psychologist had been surveying people at Grand Prix: Montreal to find data on gaming and passion. When I followed that lead, I found an entire body of research on passion that ultimately inspired my Confronting Geek Shame article. The research was done by people in a Social Psychology department, a field that is considered slightly different than my Clinical Psychology program. As a result, there’s no telling when—if ever—I would have found that research by constraining myself to the usual Clinical Psychology channels.

Weak ties can create some particularly unexpected moments when someone reaches beyond the reason the tie was originally created. When I tweeted about wanting to do a psych study on using Magic in therapy, a random college kid in Ohio told me that he wanted to do the same someday. I suggested that he find a psych lab to join, which was apparently just the advice he needed. He went out the very same day and made it happen. (I’m proud of you, Jon.) The spread of information goes beyond simple advice—think job openings or available resources.

Weak Ties and Creativity

When I begin developing an idea, I don’t only find the psychological perspective of my mentors and confidants at school and practicum—through my mentors in the Magic community, I also see the perspective of a programmer and an art director. If I take it to Twitter, I can’t even count how many different kinds of perspectives I receive. Obviously, I can’t adopt the community’s ideas blindly, as most of you are tossing out ideas without knowing the field, but there is nothing wrong with being forced to do some critical thinking.

In fact, the original weak tie researcher, Mark Granovetter, suggests that ties between dissimilar people lead to the need for cognitive flexibility (204-205). Many of your weak ties are not weak by accident—your lifestyles are too different for you to spend much time together or your values are too different for you to be good friends.

But it’s exactly those differences that can spark novel ideas. Connecting to different social groups gives you access to what one article calls different thought worlds, providing the varied ideas you need to make insightful connections (Baer 597). A nineteen-year-old math major is going to have a very different thought world than a forty-year-old nurse, and yet it would be quite realistic to see both at a Magic event. Magic also pulls together geographic social circles—at Grand Prix: Anaheim last weekend, we had five different countries represented by the judging staff alone.

In addition, with the obvious exception of family, all strong ties start out as weak ones. A study of MBA students suggest that having a variety of diverse role models encourages you to try on different personas, helping you figure out what fits you, leading to a stronger professional identity down the road (Dobrow & Higgins 579). Strengthening some of your most widely scattered connections can help you get the varied viewpoints you need. In my case it was a combination of professional perspectives, geeky perspectives, and personal perspectives of friends and mentors that started me down a career path that was true to myself.

And So . . .

For many people, the Magic community is just a place to have a good time and talk about the latest events. And that’s fine—that’s all I was looking for a few years ago. But if you’re at a point in your life when you’re hoping for a bit more from your community, check out those weak ties. Let people know what you’re up to in your non-Magic life, see whom you can help and who can help you.

We’re all Magic players, yes, but that’s not all of who we are. We’re therapists, artists, parents, students, and more. You’ve already brought your unique perspective on the game to the table; now let’s hear your unique perspective on everything else. As always, please share questions, comments, and interesting links—please share your thought world—at the bottom of the page or on Twitter.

Works Cited

• Baer, Markus. "The Strength-of-Weak-Ties Perspective on Creativity: A Comprehensive Examination and Extension." Journal of Applied Psychology. 90.3 (2010): 592-601. Web. 29 May 2012..
• Dobrow, Shoshanna, and Monica Higgins. "Developmental Networks and Professional Identity: A Longitudinal Study." Career Development International. 10.6 (2005): 567-583. Web. 29 May. 2012..
• Granovetter, Mark. "The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited." Sociological Theory. (1983): 201-234. Web. 18 May 2012.
• Kavanaugh, Andrea, Debbie Reese, John Carroll, and Mary Rosson. "Weak Ties in Networked Communities."Information Society. 21.2 (119): 131. Web. 18 May 2012..
• Ruef, Martin. "Strong Ties, Weak Ties, & Islands: Structural and Cultural Predictors of Organizational Innovation." Industrial and Corporate Change. 11.3 (2002): 427-449. Web. 18 May 2012..
• Virk, Amardeep. "Twitter: The Strength of Weak Ties."University of Auckland Business Review. 13.1 (2011): 19-21. Web. 18 May 2012..