Purity Tests

“Purity tests”, in the context of signature codes and USENET, are tests a person could take to describe their behaviors and preferences. Each question is worth one or more points, which are then totaled into a label or score. By posting one’s score, the user simultaneously asserts their social status and spreads the meme.

These tests became popular at the same time that signature codes and geek codes became popular, and for similar reasons: they were easy-to-create ways to profess fandom or social identity, requiring nothing more than some web space and HTML skills.

Some of these tests were then paired with and incorporated into corresponding signature codes, including:

Though these “tests” were almost always meant in fun, sociologists have also pointed out that geek code and purity test memes also serve as an identity-policing or gatekeeping function in the community. From Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett’s 2017 book Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing:

While the nature of purity tests involves progressing to extremes for humor, there’s an earnestness to the set of questions and the very idea of the test as determinant. This collection of requirements still offers a glimpse into a common definition of geekdom, even twenty years later. The test ends with the reminder “The more yes answers you give, the more Geek you are. If you got 0%, then you too can work for UCSC” (The Armory 1994). A low Geek or Nerd test purity score (that is, a high level of geekdom or nerdiness based on the test standards) remains a marker of pride and used to be included on forum signatures and profiles. Likewise, Robert Hayden’s “Geek Code” evolved as a way to recognize different types of geeks, with the last official version published in 1996, while the concept has lived on. Such tests suggest the quantifiable and shared identifiers that united geek culture with the rise of the Internet as a communal geek space, enabling feelings of exclusivity and power particularly as computers, and thus the tools of geeks, became more essential to everyone’s life. The very existence of these tests and quantifiers suggest an anxiety of belonging and identity formation with very structured measures for inclusion and the promise from those on the other side of the computer screen that you are not alone. They also form the basis for an explicit ranking system by which members can measure their own centrality to the community and judge those less aligned.

Test lists

See also