Time declares games cool. Time to find a new hobby?

In the latest edition of Time Magazine, Lev Grossman recalls a time when J.R.R. Tolkien was uncool, comics were for nerds, and games were for the scrawny bookish kids who wore thick glasses and got picked last for kickball.

"Over the past few years, an enormous shift has taken place in American culture.... What was once hopelessly geeky—video games, fantasy novels, science fiction, superheroes—has now, somehow, become cool," writes Grossman.

As Joystiq reader Pickypants recently noted in a post comment, mainstream adoption of nerdcore may not be all that great for counterculturalists who kind of liked their outsider status. He wrote, "... jesus, the more "mainstream" games get, the more I want to disappear down a side-street."