GGG

Geek and Gamer Girls. Why are we so rare? (Or "supposedly" rare.) The story goes that if you say you're a girl, you're a Guy In Real Life. (Honestly, how much fun can trolling like that really be? Why lead some poor schmuck on, pretending you're something you're not?)

I think that the answer is (to the original question, not the next ones about Guys In Real Life, that was a tangent.... oh look! A squirrel!!) that advertising is directed solely to guys. "Play a game where you get a BIG GUN (penis) and go around shooting and tea-bagging your friends!" "Play a game where you get to play a girl (wtf?!) with huge, gravity-defying breasts!" (oh, ok, I get that, if you're going to be staring at somebody's butt for hours on end, it might as well look good...)

The thing that bothers me is that the industry is treating women like we're too dumb to appreciate geekery. I know there are a few rebels out there (like me) who have serious geek-cred resumes, but why aren't the software companies, computer industry, comic book industry and movie industry trying to target us? There's probably more GGG than the industry believes.

Part of the problem is perception, on the part of other women. Teenaged girls are incredibly easy to manipulate. Fitting in is probably the most important aspect of their lives. So if a friend says "ewwwww, why are you reading THAT?" when she's got a copy of Heinlen's Stranger in a Strange Land in her hands, the potential GGG will hide the book, hide her passion for sci-fi and pretend to like the Twilight series like the rest of her sheep friends.

Does anyone remember the talking Barbie that said "Math is HARD!" Yeah, keep patronizing us, you corporate idiots.

I've been a GGG since my Dad started reading me The Hobbit as a kid. He followed with the Lord of the Rings series. I picked up the rest of Tolkein's short stories myself. Then Heinlen, Phillip K. Dyck, Jose Farmer, Frank Herbert, David Eddings, Guy Gavriel Kay, and probably lots more authors that nobody's heard about except me. I collected comic books. I played Dungeons and Dragons (for probably longer than most of you reading this have been alive.) My first "console" game was a computer, and I coded my OWN games. I hung out with the guys because the guys loved what I loved. Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, video games (I played them all, I threw so many quarters into upright video games I could have had a downpayment for a house. This was back when arcades were the big thing, in the 70's and 80's.)

And I was usually the only girl there.

But there was something else I noticed. I was always around guys, hung out with guys, but the guys didn't notice... I WASN'T A GUY. All the OTHER girls wanted boyfriends. I had dozens of friends, all of them boys, all of them geeks.

Then I figured something else out. Geek guys really don't notice you're a girl if you act like a geek. You are one of them. Kinda like the Borg, I guess. And this is likely because geek guys think all girls look like comic book heroines, in spandex and little else, or running around like Lara Croft with pistols strapped to her legs... and since these girls don't actually exist in real life, they don't know what they're looking at when they see a real girl.

SMART women are starting to look for geek guys to marry, because eventually, geeks will control the world. However, REALLY smart women ARE GGG. And they find the geek guys with the best potential and inform them that they will be marrying them. Most geek guys are pretty willing to go along with that. You just need to let them know what's going on. And besides, is there anything you can think of that's more cool than a spouse who will play Minecraft with you, and go to all the best sci-fi movies without telling you that you owe her a chick-flick later?

... just don't get too pissed off when she frags you, and teabags your steaming corpse.