I reckon the the gaming community is at a funny point in its history. To get here, we first had to recognise that we are, in fact, a community. And nothing fosters self-awareness like derision.
In MAD magazine, in movies like Revenge of the Nerds and Grandma‘s Boy, society learns that game geeks are pasty-faced asthmatics who rarely, if ever, venture into the Big Outside. Our hardware is potent, our sexual frustration formidable. We are this guy:
Or at least we thought we were.
Gamers everywhere began to embrace, and even celebrate, their limited athleticism and excruciating pick-up lines precisely at the point when it became obvious that not all of us were the same.
Turns out, some of us look this:
Let me sabotage my own argument for a second, by saying that I am not a hundred percent convinced by Olivia Munn, anointed hottie of the entire gaming subculture. As a host of G4TV‘s popular Attack of the Show, it is Munn‘s prerogative to be entertaining. When you‘re resorting to Wonder Woman costumes and faux lesbianism often as she does to make a point, however, your vaunted “œgeekiness“ is just as predatory as it is patriotic.
I digress. There are gamers who look just like Olivia, the point being not that gamers are an untapped source of sexay, but more importantly, that we‘re all different.
Blame it on the Wii, blame it on PopCap if you like, but the reality is that we now have gamers who look like this:
Some of us have kids. Some us do yoga. Some of us have tans! We‘ve grown up from being a group that lives consistently, spectacularly, up to our own stereotype to a motley diaspora that‘s brought together only by the one thing that matters: we frikkin‘ love to game.
It will be a sad day when gamers prefer airbrushed idols and perfect-ten spokesmodels to represent them, in favour of grade-A geeks like Shigeru Miyamoto (bless him). Just because we‘re a regular looking bunch these days doesn‘t mean that we should forget our proud heritage of suspenders, dorky hair and braces.
Personally, I don‘t want to live in a world where this guy couldn‘t be considered a God amongst men-with-Gamecubes:
