Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, the release of OS X Mountain Lion, Cole Hamels’ enormous contract, or your favorite beach, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
From booth babes to cosplayers to television hosts, I’ve noticed this strange backlash towards women that are considered faux geek. Considering that many of us have nerdy hobbies that we’ve been ostracized for, it’s a little bit funny to hear about nerds complaining about women pretending to be nerds or not being nerdy enough. GeekOut’s Joe Peacock wrote a lengthy rant about ” pretty girls pretending to be geeks for attention”. My favorite part, naturally, was his take on our beloved Olivia Munn:
The growing presence of these Olivia Munn types in the geek community is creating dialog that isn’t helping anyone.
You have these models-cum-geeks like Olivia Munn and practically every FragDoll. These chicks? Not geeks. I think that their rise is due to the fact that corporations are figuring out that geeks have money, and they want it. But they can’t abide putting a typically geeky face on camera, so they hire models to act quirky and sell this marketable geekdom.
That bit about Olivia aside, Peacock’s post is interesting and passionate. There’s a lot I agree with, but there are some parts of his argument and overall sentiment that I can’t back. I also think he’s being tough on the Frag Dolls. I’ve met several of them and they were all gamer geeks. My old Reset co-host Kat Hunter was a Frag Doll and currently works for Blizzard, which makes her a geek godess. She would be insulted if someone accused her of being a faux geek…and then she’d own them in Halo.
For the most part, I’m not too bothered by women pretending to be nerds just to get attention. People pretend to be things they’re not all the time. Finding, forming, and accepting an identity is a difficult and fluid thing. One case where it does bother me is when the posers make things more difficult for the real deals. I’ve met a lot of female gamers that have felt unaccepted by some of their male counterparts. Fake geeks just make things harder for them. That makes me sad. Can’t we all just play with our lightsabers and get along?!?
I think the simple truth is that gaming isn’t geeky anymore.
I mean, there are some games that are obviously more geeky than others. But generally, gaming has entered the mainstream. Sales numbers alone prove that.
Now, if this conversation was about hot girls that play D&D… there’d be a bit more credibility.
Outstanding point. I’m not even sure what’s considered nerdy and geeky these days. I’ll have to give that some thought. Perhaps that’s a future column.
I think watching eSports, subbing to an MMO where you dedicate hours to raiding each week, and delving into single player sagas are nerdy and geeky. I think pvp in an FPS is very mainstream these days.
That’s because geeks were the first hipsters. If you’ve ever heard one of your friends utter something like “I liked video games before they were cool,” then you know…..
This is retarded. Who cares about some eye candy’s geek cred? Is this really something to even expend thought energy on? This is like someone being pissed off at strippers for only pretending to like the guy that throws $1 bills at them.
Companies using women to parade around as walking billboards to peddle their products or gain access to the wallets of young male consumers who are easily distracted by good looks?! I’m shocked!! I can’t believe that an organization centered around profit would ever think to do something so sinister!
/end sarcasm
Seriously; Play your games, drink your Mountain Dew, and enjoy the boobs before they start sagging. You should just be grateful that they even want our attention.
-M
I don’t have any issue with a hot woman being involved with gaming or anything geeky or nerdy. What I do have a problem with is when these personalities (male and female) are shown to have marginal brain function in ads or television. Either I’m out of touch with the gaming community, which could be the case due to age, or focus groups show that 16-19 year old males have considerably more disposable income than me and it has to be fought over using idiots.
Bolivia Bunn was a total dumbass on AoTS.
Kind of a tangent. I apologize.
I’ll actually take Cliffy B’s argument on this one and combine it with my own thoughts.
https://twitter.com/therealcliffyb/status/84450045742682112
It’s about people hijacking something that isn’t really theirs. I got made fun of a lot for liking and playing video games and Spider-Man when I was younger. That didn’t change as I got older, and we can talk about how gaming isn’t nerdy any more but there are still too many people out there with stereotypes about what a gamer is or isn’t. The argument has become geared towards gamer girls, which is unfortunate, because I don’t really care whether you are a guy or a girl as long as you can show you have some merit for being a gamer. Some people think they are gaming girls because they play CoD when their boyfriends make them or because they got mad at not being able to beat a level once before. They are clearly different from the girls I’ve met who played Diablo or Wow all the time, and even different from the girls who still only play CoD but do so because they want to. To be clear, I don’t really consider plenty of guys I’ve met to be actual gamers for similar reasons. They only play madden each year, or they have every CoD game and won’t give anything else a try. When I try to talk about other games to people like that they usually react negatively to people who play anything more than what they do.
When a stripper pretends to like a guy for throwing dollar bills at her there is an understanding, whether spoken or not, that this is pretend. I personally don’t want that kind of pretending around me when it comes to things that I actually enjoy. I’m happy for game companies becoming mainstream and more popular, but that doesn’t mean I appreciate people hijacking something that I actually have a history with just because they suddenly feel it’s cool to talk about.
So by that logic, if you were a strip club connoisseur and you were frequenting clubs before it was mainstream, you’d be pissed if everyone started visiting strip clubs on a regular basis because you feel that you supported the skanks before we all realized what you figured out a long time ago: boobies in your face are awesome.
Same thing goes for gaming. Yes, we (here) all have a cherished past relationship with the gaming industry and because of it, we feel a misguided sense of personal attachment. We don’t “own” any rights to anything in the video game industry, only the memories we have of it.
The nature of the business is to either grow or die. The video game industry has grown and will continue to grow and the only way to do that is to get more customers. The eventual outcome of this is that everyone will come to accept gaming as the norm. We should be welcoming these “hijackers of gaming” with open arms and try to get them to expand their horizons beyond Call of Duty and Madden (and Angry Birds and Farmville). We need them so that our industry can continue producing products that are better than the year before. Because games are mainstream, there are a lot more people making games and a lot more games. This is a good thing. It gives us variety and fosters innovation.
Cliffy B’s quote (and those who agree with him) on this matter is one of entitlement. Nobody has a right to keep the gaming industry to themselves and it would be selfish and counter-productive to do so. If you really like games and want to see the industry evolve and progress, you have to let as many people in as possible. Who knows, maybe one of these “gaming phonies” may turn out to be a real gaming connoisseur in time…. just like you are with strip clubs.
-M
Those skanks are working their way through school so they can teach Elementary school. Show some respect!
actually the two girls I knew who stripped their way through college went in to social work and criminal justice.
Not necessarily because the gaming industry has much more to offer than strip clubs. The number of game genres easily is superior to the number of ways in which a woman can take her clothes off in front of me for money. If people who don’t have as vested of an interest in the gaming industry start speaking with their dollars on games that don’t appeal to me then I have a problem with that. My interest in this whole industry is selfish and based on what I want/can get out of it, which if I’m not mistaken would actually be the Randian approach. Thus you get my statements that I’ve made in the past against casual games, especially on mobile platforms.
Yes the industry needs growth, but the style of growth that occurs is important. If the people who are hijacking the culture of gaming then they have the ability, assuming they are spending within the culture, to incite growth, it should not be assumed that the growth they are providing is good for the industry. Personally I don’t like seeing the biggest games of the year end up being the same franchises each year. Sure there is growth, but is that growth productive for the gaming industry and culture that has been fostered since it’s birth? It is my opinion that it is not.
Of course there is entitlement in this idea, but so what? I actually care about console gaming more than mobile gaming, but I seem to be in the minority every time I see the issue discussed broadly. At C2E2 a few months ago Tokz and I sat in on a panel about the Chicago gaming industry where some of the developers from that area talked about how they were producing quality content from this region of the country, yet are largely ignored. All that the majority of the people could talk about was mobile gaming, because that’s all that they did. One person works with Epic sometimes, but he was really the only one in the entire city who did something like that. Now of course this is only one area of the country, and definitely not the biggest area for developers, but they were younger and newer game developers. If this is any indication of how younger and newer developers are approaching the game industry then I can’t really agree with it, and the main reason they are going there is because that’s where the money is. Now I’m in favor of seeing new business models within the gaming industry, but not when only casual gaming is concerned; and so far, that is all that I see.
You’re not going to the right strip clubs.
Does it really matter that these booth babes, models or frag dolls are pretending to be geeks. These guys cant be serious. Theyre women. Good looking women selling themselves for ur attention for their companies. If u really care if they game or not ur missing the point. The time someone should really care is if youre lucky to be marrying one of these chicks and they tell u they dont game and only did it to land u. On second thought u should still marry them even if they game or not if theyre hot and want to be with a gamer or geek like u.
The whole fake gamer girl stems back to the introduction of the casual gamer or moderate gamer types that just happen to be attractive guys, though I wouldn’t surprised there are attractive hardcore gaming guy who are attractive. Never the less the problem is that pop culture has allowed gaming to become so big that even guy who normally don’t play games are now playing them and women wouldn’t even remotely play a game are now finding out about this phenomenon and trying get on the band wagon in order to get these guys. these guys have become like flowers out in someones backyard. If you plant flower outside, don’t be surprised it attracts a bee or two….