This is why I hate "Fake Geek/Gamer Girls"

[-Dragmire-]

gamers used to be mocked and made fun of, anything dealing with video games immediately made you a loser, a nerd, an outsider, and a socially awkward kid that kept to a small group of other losers.
Culturally we didn't have any value and as a market we were a niche... Now people want to be us, they want to act like us, and pretend to enjoy the same things we do; and do you know why? Because now, we're cool! So stop complaining about being a purist and start enjoying the fact that; plain and simple, we won!

It's actually come full circle, back when arcades were at their peak it was normal find business men in full suits using their lunch break to play arcade games. The whole mocking thing related to games happened later after the video game market crashed.

 

[lord canti]

Hey here's a crazy idea. How about we stop putting our subculture on a pedestal it doesn't need to be on and let who ever wants to be a nerd/geek be a nerd and a geek.Seriously aren't people just doing the same thing that we went through? Then why in the world would we want to exile anyone who wants to be into the nerd culture? Get over yourselves.

 

[gibboss28]

Hmm, ok, yes, interesting, I see, wow really? that's very interes- No wait, its not. its stupid its dumb, as are you for bringing this beaten horse back up.

Now if you'll excuse me as its Christmas I'm going to have a few bevvys with my friends and have an awesome time. have fun wasting your time on something so fucking stupid.

 

[Netrigan]

This guy is full of himself. His analogy kinda sucked. And you don't have to be a dysfunctional, emotionally abused person to be a nerd...

That was exactly my thought.

I'm not a socially outgoing person, but I've never really been unhappy or alienated. I had few friends in high school, but got along with just about everyone. My older sister, which did attempt to court popularity, was kind of irritated that I had managed more pictures in the year book than she did. I was friendly with people on the year book staff and they gave me a few "Steve rushing to class" pictures in addition to my Chess Club photo and class picture.

Didn't ask for them, didn't desire them. I'm just one of those fairly well-adjusted people who would rather spend the evening curled up with his comic collection than going out to parties.

And it also over-looks the simple fact that so many of the popular kids are incredibly alienated. We may be physically alone, but they're often emotionally alone which is just as devastating. The pretty girls often have eating disorders proving they're just as uncomfortable in their own skins as the lonely geek in the corner. What's worse, not being accepted for who you are or being accepted for something you're not? Some of these "popular" people live in fear of being discovered and cast out.

And absolutely none of this has anything to do with whether or not you have a sincere love of geek culture. Vin Diesel is a D&D nerd David Tennant is a massive Doctor Who geek. Their nerd status isn't held up to scrutiny because they can get laid. Yet a pretty girl who is constantly treated with suspicion.

Whatever, we don't quiz the 7 year old who claims to be Spider-Man's biggest fan, we just enjoy his/her enthusiasm.

 

[n00beffect]

Oh for the love of- This again? Okay peeps, I'm getting pretty goddamn sick of this nonsense, so here's a slightly simpler explanations of why gamers hate fake gamer/geek girls: They can't score with them. I know it's rather Freudian, but stick with me here, because this... this transcends simplicity. Men (or rather, boy) gamers hate fgg's because if they weren't fake, they think, they'd actually have a shot with them; but, since they're not really geek girls, and aren't really interested in their Azaroth fire staff of doom, or whatever, then there's no gurshdarn chance in the world they would ever sleep with them. That's what enrages little gamer boys, the fact that they can't impress those luscious boobies being flaunted in front of them, and hence can't get to grope them like they oh-so want to. Gamer girls on the other hand (I mean real ones) because most of them have inferiority complexes the size of f-ing Everest, feel threatened by the fgg and hence dislike them. Them luscious boobies make them feel even more inferior, and insecure.

Ergo, you peeps need to stop venting your sexual frustration because, really, it's pathetic. Watching you try and justify you're irrational hatred for luscious boobies that are wayyy out of your reach - it's just sad.

 

[ludusprime]

Such is the cost of a subculture gaining a large enough following. Did you really think geek culture or video games or comic books or anything wouldn't have pretenders as soon as it was profitable or revered in mainstream popculture? It's simply what was going to happen.

And your basketball metaphor doesn't totally add up. If you're calling yourself a professional athlete, that would suggest you play basketball really well. The bar for entry to be a geek isn't about talent, it's simply enjoying a tv show or pass time or whatever. You don't get to set standards for what constitutes as being a true fan or not simply because you are one. If you ran a fan club, maybe you would, but you don't get to establish default requirements for the entire internet.

Besides, if people are pretending to share a cultural identity with you, what have you lost? It's not like the characters changed or the gameplay gets altered. If your enjoyment of something is effected by someone you never have to acknowledge then you have the problem.

 

[-Dragmire-]

Gamer girls on the other hand (I mean real ones) because most of them have inferiority complexes the size of f-ing Everest, feel threatened by the fgg and hence dislike them. Them luscious boobies make them feel even more inferior, and insecure.

Come on, I agree with most of your statement but this is needlessly hostile. I don't know most gamer girls and neither do you, you're making grand assumptions with nothing to base it on other than possible personal experience. It's similar to saying that most gamer guys have inferiority complexes toward sport jocks. Not only does it imply that most crave to be that type of person (or at least their body type), it also implies that merely having gaming as a hobby means most represent the negative stereotype of a gamer. That's rather sad too.

 

[whycantibelinus]

gamers used to be mocked and made fun of, anything dealing with video games immediately made you a loser, a nerd, an outsider, and a socially awkward kid that kept to a small group of other losers.

I have been playing games my entire life, been into off beat sci-fi and horror movies and tv shows, stuff like that, couldn't really relate to the mainstream world, i guess. I can't ever remember a time when "liking video games" got you labeled as a fucking loser who deserved nothing but disdain from the cool kids. Now I have suffered my own fair share of bullying, getting made fun of for wearing glasses, getting beat up and forced to do someone else's homework, getting picked last on sports teams in school all the fun stuff of childhood, not ONCE was I ever victimized or saw someone victimized because of "lulz! wut a fag! they play video gamez! GETTEM!!!". Granted this is just my and my friends experiences but I'd like to think I have lived a fairly normal slice of life in this modern world. I hate this idea. It's the cry of the victim and fuck being a victim. Let it be.

 

[White-Death]

I've never really experienced the fake geek girl/gamer looking for attention type of person.Well,except the usual
''I watch the Big Bang Theory, I'm such a nerd! Bazinga!Science references that I don't understand because I'm an inattentive cretin!lololol!''

I think the whole fake geek girls are attaxing us!!!!!!oneoone!1111111!!!!!!1111!1 stuff is way overblown and silly.Just like the ''W3 shud b4n raep jokes cuz they cause trauma by jsut menshuning them!!11'' issue a few months ago.

I mock people too much in my posts.*Sigh*

 

[Savryc]

Gaming had meaning? Pull the other one mate. It's a time-sink, it's entertainment, nothing more.

 

[Daveman]

Pfft, I just think geeks need to get over themselves. I mean sure it's annoying, but the video in the OP is just a bit to whiny. Defining yourself as a geek is a bit pointless anyway, it's just another ridiculous label that people attach. Who's to say that the fact that I know virtually the entirety of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by heart should mean I can't be a social guy, or like sport or whatever. I mean I found out the other day my friend hadn't even seen all the star wars films and he is pretty bloody geeky and anti-social. These things aren't well defined, they're stereotypes and if you expect everyone to conform to your idea of "person who was bullied at school and was into the same stuff as I was to at least the same level of interest" then obviously you'll be mistaken.

All this treating it like it's the n-word is bloody ridiculous.

 

[Jenvas1306]

Why is there another thread like this? This is one of those topics that are chewed by so many mouths, that, after losing its original taste, it gained a new one.

saying that only gamer girls are a problem is terribly sexist. Its hipsters who bother anyone who is really interessted into something they just shallowly touch, both male and female hipsters btw.
Oh and hipsters are attracted to what is in, cool, or hip. So the conclusion is that nerd/geek stuff now becomes cool. I cant see how that would be bad.
Calling yourself prideful a nerd, cause you suffered for it is very stupid, like being proud of your incapabilities. I also had a hard time in school, but not cause I like games. Here, in my generation, playing games is normal. Things like D&D might be a little further out, but you dont become a social reject by liking it, or have to be a social reject to like it. That is ones own personality, not your interessts.

I like BBT, as I like HIMYM, cause they deal with social dynamics, which I like. I dont think they make fun of nerds just by showing those guys are nerds. In my opinion Leonards gf, Penny, is not nerd enough for him and even fails to see it as a value, so joke is on her. That show shows guys who have interessts in games, comics and the like and still have normal human problems. I'm just missing the fangirl faction there.

My BF plays D&D, I find it interessting, but I'm lacking the base knowledge. Currently I'm reading up on it and will probably play in a friends next campain. I'm new to D&D, I dont know as much about it, noone ever mocked me for liking it, so am I now a fake D&D-girl?


Oh and this:

Gaming had meaning? Pull the other one mate. It's a time-sink, it's entertainment, nothing more.

 

[Snake Plissken]

How can you be upset about your culture being "sold en masse" when it's entirely based around products which are "sold en masse"?

 

[n00beffect]

Gamer girls on the other hand (I mean real ones) because most of them have inferiority complexes the size of f-ing Everest, feel threatened by the fgg and hence dislike them. Them luscious boobies make them feel even more inferior, and insecure.

Come on, I agree with most of your statement but this is needlessly hostile. I don't know most gamer girls and neither do you, you're making grand assumptions with nothing to base it on other than possible personal experience. It's similar to saying that most gamer guys have inferiority complexes toward sport jocks. Not only does it imply that most crave to be that type of person (or at least their body type), it also implies that merely having gaming as a hobby means most represent the negative stereotype of a gamer. That's rather sad too.

Okay, okay, fair enough. You're right, it is based on personal xp, but it is a possibility. Envy is a common human trait, more common than you think. And it's normal, I'm not saying it's not. What I'm saying is that it's sad to try and justify that envy, or any other purely emotional response to the issue, and to try and rationalize it through weak, non-arguments and statements. And maybe i was a bit callas in saying that gamer girls specifically exhibit envy towards those better-endowed. In fact that applies to most human beings, not just girls. And yes, most people desire that kind of body-type, regardless of whether you're a gamer or not. Everyone wants to be fit, good-looking, etc. So yeah, I guess I should have just expanded the spectrum and phrased my argument better. And though it may be offensive - it's true. Not for everyone, but for most.

 

[n00beffect]

gamers used to be mocked and made fun of, anything dealing with video games immediately made you a loser, a nerd, an outsider, and a socially awkward kid that kept to a small group of other losers.

I have been playing games my entire life, been into off beat sci-fi and horror movies and tv shows, stuff like that, couldn't really relate to the mainstream world, i guess. I can't ever remember a time when "liking video games" got you labeled as a fucking loser who deserved nothing but disdain from the cool kids. Now I have suffered my own fair share of bullying, getting made fun of for wearing glasses, getting beat up and forced to do someone else's homework, getting picked last on sports teams in school all the fun stuff of childhood, not ONCE was I ever victimized or saw someone victimized because of "lulz! wut a fag! they play video gamez! GETTEM!!!". Granted this is just my and my friends experiences but I'd like to think I have lived a fairly normal slice of life in this modern world. I hate this idea. It's the cry of the victim and fuck being a victim. Let it be.

Oh. Really? Well, adjust your focus just a tad, namely towards the main-stream media in general, and you'll see his point. Not only does the media paint gamers as losers, but news-anchors, tv hosts, etc. Even those cutsie little interviews that youtube celebritiy-wanna-be's do with girls, asking them if they would date a gamer, and so on. Everything around us paints as losers, and just because you weren't bullied directly, doesn't mean we're not being bullied (albeit indirectly) by politicians and the mainstream, sometimes even by parents.

 

[Abomination]

I always thought the "fake gamer/nerd girl" was just the obnoxious facebook pictures of a girl holding a controller (in her teeth often for some reason, that's the last place you should put something multiple people have had their cheeto dusted [and therefore licked] hands all over) while wearing some skimpy clothes captioned with "omg i played mai cuzins zelda im such a nerd lolol xox".

Which people found hilariously sad.

Then it seems people missed the boat and took it to an unnatural extreme, decrying it as an attack on an entire sub-culture when they should have just laughed at the girls stupid pretension and moved on with their lives (or self proclaimed lack thereof).

 

[IamLEAM1983]

How can you be upset about your culture being "sold en masse" when it's entirely based around products which are "sold en masse"?

Oh, you can. Especially when you put blinders on and convince yourself that anything that gets put out by the Big Three has zero qualitative or artistic value. Didn't you know? Indies are where it's at, maaaaan. They can be, like, deep and introspective and shit! Anything that's not indie is for braindead dude-bros!

Gaming is what it is. That includes both the triple A sector and the indie studios. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't see it that way. They like to imagine that gaming always had some intrinsic meaning, when that's more of a recent development in game design than anything else. For most of the eighties and nineties, games were pure Score Attack affairs. Basically arcade ports. Only RPGs managed to buck that trend.

Now that games can explore deeper narratives, people pull out their rose-tinted glasses and their Narrative Devices classes and pull out Greimas and Tomachevsky on Super Mario Bros - saying that every life and every stage and level is a narrative all its own. I don't dispute that, but it does seem like this involves looking for artistic value in the deepest nooks and crannies of the medium. Especially those with close to zero relevance to Art - at least in terms of the medium's fairly recent desire to explore emotional output from the player.

If you delude yourself into thinking that gaming always had some profound meaning to divulge even in the Commodore 64's days, then you see modern games that buck that trend - competitive games - in a fairly excessive and negative light.

In simpler terms, if you're of the mind that gaming is special, you'll more than likely smile at the Galaxy titles for the Wii and shake your head in dismay at anything CoD-related. Things aren't so cut-and-dry. Both have mechanics, both reflect on their own style in their own way. One is just brought up to be the symbol of everything that's currently wrong with the gaming industry, while the other gets fairly intense praise.

Why is that? Because, like you said, games have always been a mass-produced commodity. Even the most artsy-fartsy of projects will have a bottom line it needs to reach to keep its developer afloat. If it's not in cash, then it's in notability.

 

[n00beffect]

I blame big bang theory.

this is a much more meaningful post than I think the poster realises.

The Big Bang Theory is a great example of what people are talking about when they say they're upset at "fake" gamers. BBT is a by-the-numbers college sitcom draped in the superficial trappings of nerd culture, in a fairly shallow attempt at appealing to that demographic without actually sharings its interests or even really understanding what it's talking about. Instead, they just go over stale sitcom plots and occasionally name-drop Green Lantern or Jean-Luc Picard.

BBT is cultural appropriation, and the reason why nerdy people like me find it a terribly offensive show is that most of the time, the joke is on us - BBT ridicules the subculture it pretends to be a part of. Its target audience isn't geeks; it's people who want to make fun of geeks. Almost all of its jokes are based around some permutation of the concept that gamers and nerds are borderline autistic loners with no social skills and an obsessive mind for useless pop trivia or incomprehensible scientific jargon.

We're at this weird stage where gamer culture is sufficiently mainstream that a "geek sitcom" would get made, but not yet at the stage where the media can actually treat gamer culture with anything approaching maturity or respect. So we get these half-assed attempts at cashing in on our interests without actually engaging with them. We get the Big Bang Theory.

If you're like Archer666, and all you hear is "I'm a misogynistic elitist!" when someone says "I don't like fake gamers," look at the Big Bang Theory. That's what those people are talking about. It's hardly elitism to get upset at a shitty sitcom that appropriates the trappings of your subculture for the sole purpose of making fun of you.

It also shouldn't have anything to do with gender, but everyone acts like it does, and frankly that obscures the core issue.

See, you're right in some respects; however, what you don't quite see is the underlining irony both of the BBT and the argument you're trying to make. Fist of all - yes, it does, to a degree paint gamers/nerds as anti-social autistics, but, at the same time, you have to remember that all of the characters (besides Raj) have girlfriends, and two of them are very hot. Many times, the show makes the argument that while nerds/gamers (in their opinion) are weird people, they're also nice, smart guys, far superior to their jock, meat-head, macho counterparts. So, while it does make jokes on our expense, it also builds us up as idols, and someone to be looked-up to.
Secondly, and most importantly, you get offended by the little jokes and stuff - why? Just think about it for a sec, and you'll probably get you'll answer - they offend you because they offend you. See, if you find something offensive, that means that this something is actually corresponding in some way with a particular fear or insecurity of yours. It means you're taking this whole gamer/nerd title pretty seriously, and you're letting it define you. If you can't take a step backwards and actually learn to laugh at the flaws of the particular sub-culture you subscribe to, then it means that those titles - gamer/nerd - are too strong a trait of your character, almost bordering on fanaticism. Mind, I said almost.

 

[funnydude6556]

Overall video games is experiencing a commodification of a culture where what used to have meaning is being sold en masse and this makes people who are actually part of that culture mad. It would be like if I played 10 minutes of basketball and called myself a professional athlete and tried to fit in with other 6'4" basketball players.

The best example is the punk rock which was anti establishment but now you can buy punk rock on iTunes and buy spiky belts in Hot Topic.

mod note: please embed your videos

This video is stupid. I went through that, a lot of people tried to make me feel like an outsider because of the things I liked but why should I make other people feel like that? To me I feel like I don't win anything by making others feel just as bad if anything I'd feel like I deserved all those years of harassment if I couldn't go against that and by excepting of others.

This isn't some enemy to nerd/geek culture, it's other people who want to become a part of something really great and fun, what right do we have to slam the door on them? If you've experianced what it's like to not be excepted, you know how upsetting it feels and if you think you going through that gives you the right to pass it on to others, you deserved EVERY SECOND OF IT.

Also about The Big Bang Theory

1) Has this guy watched any Sitcoms? Most if not all sitcom characters have crappy social lifes and the joke is often around their lack of experience in a certain field

2)If anything the message is more around how these people seem weird from the outside but really their cool guys if you make the time to get to know them, Penny doesn't hang around with them to look cooler then them but because their good friends of hers.

3) The IT Crowd is the exact same show. Two nerds who become friends with a hot chick who promises to make them cooler whilst they point out the stupider mistakes she makes whilst making geek culture references. No he's right their COMPLETELY different! I'm a big fan of both shows and I don't see why I should stop watching them because the alpha-nerd assholes feel like throwing a tantrum.