I work hard to prove to people that geeks are just folks with different ideas of fun. I make sure to temper any geekery with the awareness that there are non-geeks around, and include them in conversations. I try not to use words with more than 3 syllables in every day conversation (unless I’m trying to remind people that I am, in fact, fairly competent and bright). I do a fairly good job. Heck, people at my work don’t think I’m the geekiest guy on the floor (that honor is reserved for our resident WoW pimp, who has asked *everyone* on the floor to play).
So it is with great anger that I find things like this:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=56643
Hot Chicks, the RPG. It’s full of computer generated boobs and babes, apparently. And its mere existence makes my life about 7.43% more difficult.
I live in Wisconsin. It’s a bit different out here – they still talk about Star Trek like the only people that watch it are basement dwelling 30 year olds. When they mention video games, they do the hyuk-hyuk laugh. But generally, it’s not bad. Cause they’ve never seen Hot Chicks.
Of course, when I first moved here, I was reminded of something. The guys on this blog (I don’t really know the girl) are, for the most part, cool guys. Socially adjusted to some degree or another, cool with who they are, able to live a normal life. So I’ve kind of forgotten what’s out there in geek land. When I moved to WI, my wife and family didn’t come. So I set out to find like minded folks to kill two months with. I hit meetup.com and found RPG groups, and board gamers. I found a weekly gaming party, and started going. And I found, very quickly, that the board gamers were far more like me, even though I’d rather be playing RPGs. Out here, the geeks are still isolated, and segregated. They talk about the “norms” the “mundanes” or the “straights.” They wear their geekiness as a badge, because it unites them. Most of them work minimum wage jobs in a factory, or a furniture store, or retail.
And it’s weird. Because I don’t consider those “my people” any more. And I wonder if they ever were. And yet, when it came to gaming, I could out geek any of them. I could quote chapter and verse of rules. I taught them how to use AoOs. They had some geeky people, but I had *breadth* on them.
Wow. It’s not bad enough that this game has an absolutely horrid and generic setting (it’s teh future, corporations are rampant, and magical mage people have unleashed demons for no reason whatsoever. Oh, and aliens are invading, why not?) They had to go and make it worse by making the characters half-naked women who fight evil while wearing Fredrick’s of Hollywood lingerie. I would not be surprised if said demons and aliens spent most of their time trying to rape the players with tentacle penises. I don’t think you could make a game more targeted at the lowest common denominator of geekdom if you tried.
This is the kind of game some “friends” (and I use the term loosely) from my high school days would have been all over. You know the type: if they play an RPG, they’re the guy screaming from the kitchen they want to find hot girls and “do them.” If they DM, they have to put in a hot chick who wants to have sex with the players (at the very least, she’ll walk around naked with a big honking sword and make Red Sonja look puritanical).
Sigh. To the Truthmobile, my friends, we have work yet to do.
Games like this look like they are targeted at geeks, but they aren’t. They’re targeted at an “idea of a geek.” The idea that geeks are grown men who rarely bathe and don’t know any women they aren’t related to. The idea that geeks are misogynist mushrooms growing in the darkness of their piles of dirty clothes, forgotten mold covered hotpockets, and filthy masturbation-towels.
Sure, there are people like that who self-identify as geeks, but they are a minority so small that this game will never turn a profit. They are hard to find outside of the man-children who never gave up on EverQuest or trolling on the Wizards of the Coast forums.
Pingback: Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm