‘King of the Nerds’ season 2 spotlight: Will Kelsey Syers compose her own victory?
Kelsey Syers plays video-game music on the piano. She also speaks four languages, loves Japan, dresses up in traditional clothing, inserts random Japanese words into conversation that may confuse the heck out of most of her friends, loves “Game of Thrones” enough to quote it, and refers to “BioShock Infinite” as “epitome of video games as an art form.” She may as well just drop the mic and leave now. What else is there to say? (Save for maybe argue that the first “BioShock” is better, but…)
You see, we devised the Nerd Scale to have a little bit of silly fun before the “King of the Nerds” premiere on January 23, and look at what would traditionally constitute the ultimate well-balanced nerd that would completely dominate this competition (provided that they don’t do turn the ending into a popularity contest again). After all, what’s more nerdy than trying to randomly judge people on the internet with made-up criteria? We laid it all out back in our profile on Brian Davidson, and while we don’t often like to spoil what is coming a few paragraphs later, the nerd force is strong with this one.
Nerd pros – We may admit to a little bias here, mostly in that watching Kelsey’s audition video reminded us a ton of what we did during our “Beauty and the Geek” interview videos before the season: There was speaking random phrases in Japanese (it was the third year of studying it at that time, though some of that’s slipped away now), a specific interest-based outfit (in our case Auron from “Final Fantasy X”), and also lots of talking about video game music. Basically, we threw almost everything at the producers that we could to sell ourselves as worthy, and it feels like Kelsey does the same.
Even in reading her bio, you feel like she harnessed some immense brain power to come up with some creative answers, ones that answered a question by her own definition rather than the one being asked (which is always appreciated), and also ones where we have NO IDEA what she is talking about. If you stump us a la a nerd version of “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” that deserves great applause.
Nerd cons – We will admit that when we first watched her bio video and heard her Southern accent, we were taken aback. But that’s not a con so much as a misconception that all nerds have to sound a certain way (we are from Texas so we get it). Really, we wrestle with coming up with a con here. Maybe that she likes swing dancing? The only dancing that we consider truly nerdy would be A) The Robot B) The Worm and C) Memorizing the dance that Jeff Winger does with the Dean at the start of “Community’s” gas leak season.
Nerd Scale – 10 out of 10. She is either an enormous nerd worthy of battling for the throne, or just someone who came up with a bunch of hardcore-crazy-good answers to everything thrown at you to give us that impression. Kelsey’s a contender to compose her own victory song … at least in theory. Given that they can challenge you on just about anything on this show, our Nerd Scale is basically a Virtual Boy. It at least shows that with all of your powers combined, you have a great chance to take pollution down to zero win the whole competition.