Bang On, John Cheese

Go down to Number 1 on this article. This is something I've wanted to express for so long, but I've never been quite agitated by it enough to push me over the edge to go from "muttering to myself and/or grinding my teeth" to "I must go to the interwebs and complain!" Fortunately it's out of my hands now, as Cracked writer John Cheese has articulated it for me:

No, [Olivia Munn]'s not a nerdy gaming chick. She is a manufactured marketing strategy, designed to rope in drooling Internet geeks by making them think that gaming and Star Wars fandom can attract girls who look like supermodels. And it worked. She ended up with a spot on The Daily Show. She's been on the cover of Playboy. She's written books -- and here's a shocker: One of them is called Suck It, Wonder Woman: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek.

It's becoming a formula. Take a girl, dress her up in some superhero or video game character costume and send her out to a comic book convention, and watch their ratings explode.

The recent ascension of the 'hot gamer girl' has annoyed me because it is so blatantly, so shamelessly a marketing gimmick. No, these women aren't geeks and they aren't interested in the overweight bowl-cut guy wearing... Nintendo... wizard... costume? When they say they're a geek they mean they've seen Star Wars, just as when the frat boy calls himself a gamer it means he has Halo/Call of Duty/whatever other FPS with the $75 million ad budget came out recently. There's no actual respect for science-fiction or video games or other traditional geek hobbies/pursuits. It's just that mainstream society has found a way to carve a little niche within the geek sphere of influence that serves as an entry point for non-geeks.

It's like how a water park will have a little kiddie pool for the toddlers who have no business being near the actual pools and waterslides that are the entire reason for water parks to exist in the first place. Halo is the kiddie pool of video games, the first Star Wars movie is the kiddie pool of science-fiction.

I think I'm getting off topic...

On a related tangent, tomorrow would have been Bill Hicks' 50th birthday; how appropriate I'm writing this article tonight. Marketers and corporations really do have to put a dollar sign on everything, even the things they don't understand. They can only dumb them down, play up the lowest-common-denominator components like the boobs and guns, and jingle it in front of people like keys in front of a cat.

But what really bothers me is that geeks are apparently fine with this. They're fine with being condescended to, they're fine with the mainstream media thrusting memes back at us years after they've gotten old, they're fine with their "culture" being turned into nothing but another fount of money for corporations that will still, through their media outlets, truck in the stereotypes of geeks as being weak, unsocial, acne-prone, etc.

This is why I don't like The Big Bang Theory. It's nominally about geeks, but it's about laughing at them, not with them. Yet so many geeks watch it and say "Look, a show about us! They talk about science and Superman, they get us."

No, they don't. And they don't want to get you. They just want your money, just like the porn star dressed as April O'Neil wants your credit card number, not your phone number.

And I'm not saying I hate all attempts at geek "culture" being coalesced into an actual thing. I like thinkgeek.com and similar stuff. But I don't like seeing geeks try to force geek "culture" into being a thing that can be measured/catalogued/quantified, and I especially hate non-geeks trying to take it and make it their own line of products to sell back to us. And I hate that geeks allow it to happen. They don't even care.