Introverted Female Gamer Finds Survey Disturbingly Limiting

There’s gonna be a new WoW expansion, and I’m gonna make a tauren paladin tentatively named HammerofMoo, but I’ll blather more about that later.

For now, in the spirit of bipartisanship, I confess that I find bipartisanship limiting. Binary is for computers. Therefore, I present to you
Liberals

Libertarians

Conservatives

and futurists
all carping about the same stupid news article about – guess what! A lot of gamers are not teenagers, or are female or both!! (Have I not been writing about that for more than a year?) A lot of us are introverted!! And, like most cross-sections of the country these days, a lot of us are fat!!

Film at eleven.

Regardless of how you currently feel about DarthBunnywabbit’s Favorite President So Far (cracks knuckles), consider that in the comments sections of these fairly large New Media Organizations, the sentiments expressed are relatively similar: “Oh look, another stupid correlation study, what a load of crap!”

Media dinosaurs, take a hint and cease with the deliberately inflammatory correlation study article intended primarily for arguing friends and/or relatives to text links at each other to prove they win. Your target audience, whether they vote hardcore red or hardcore blue, whether they make their living extrapolating about the future in a political, business or scientific capacity, all agree: these studies are a load of crap.

Which one do I agree with? All of them. As far as text complaining about this remarkably point-missing news distraction, anyway.

Which makes my point, in fact, but I’ll get there eventually.

Consider there are two types of people in the universe. Subset A consists of people who hate videogames and want to make others stop playing them. Subset B consists of people who either like videogames or couldn’t care less. It seems logical that Subset B, since it contains the neutrals as well as the proponents, would be larger.

Now. Subset A tends to devalue such qualities as introversion
as well as age and weight. It therefore follows that Subset A consists of young extroverts who are fascinated with mating and status displays, along with a few people who mistakenly believe you have to pretend to be that way to get sex, and Subset B consists of everybody else.

Now. Why are these young extroverts going out of their way to exuberantly complain about the old, fat, and introverted?

And I was almost going to bring up that “female” because there’s a sense of “whoa, lots more chicks play than I thought, but they’re all fat, lol.”

Then consider, how the previous gamer stereotype – which the media took collective effort in building – was that gamers were all aggro young males.

Now it follows that aggro young males would pretty much fall within the category of Subset A. Extroverted, aggro, there’s really not a lot of difference. Basically the media was telling us a few years ago that gamers were no good punk kids liable to shoot up their schools, and now they’re complaining that gamers are sedentary adults prone to melancholia.

This is what professional arguers call a “Straw Man” argument. Make a straw man, dress it up like how you think the enemy would dress and see if you can get the townsfolk to form a mob and burn it. If the mob is distracted and AFK, try dressing the straw man in something even more shocking and inflammatory.

Seeing that I live in virtual reality these days, I know people mainly by text, strange as that seems. I’m as sensitive to grammatical style as audio people are to accents or visual people are to designer labels. I’m a fine upstanding citizen in virtual reality. I own status symbols, I have a successful resume, and since this would be worth about the cost of my last restaurant bill to a Chinese gold farmer, at the same time I’m willing to chuck it all and go play a new game if they ever invent a better one than WoW. I’ve seen a good cross-section of the virtual universe.

My comrades in IT departments all over the world. The students who play between chapters. The folks in low paying jobs who struggle to pay that fifteen bucks a month, and the moms stuck at home, and the nurses waiting for someone to ring the bell, and the rich bums with too many accounts, and you know I could go on but discretion stays my hand.

Anyway, there are people in virtual reality that like to grab attention by making inflammatory straw man arguments. My server is full of them. They get in trade channel, and draw their lines, praying someone will cross them. And they get ignored, and reported. They get into pugs and guilds, create strife and drama in their quest to be recognized as Gods of Typing without the introverted qualities of long restful meditative hours of solitary patience – and get kicked. Sometimes they can stir up a bit of action but the herd always seems to arrive to trample the obstreperous ones before getting back to the business of grazing, which is what we do between really intense bursts of typing, not just pretty good, but perfect and as fast as possible.

The same verbal style that’ll get you an op ed in Your Favorite News Disgorger will make you a social pariah in WoW, especially if you also stand in fire while you're talking smack.

So here’s a little straw man for you, and I’ll dress him in the latest trendazoid clothes and staple a journalism degree to his little hand.

You’re an extrovert. You depend on input from other human beings for your health and sanity. Like many young mammals you chose a particular skill to hone in your conquest for sex and cash and companionship, and in your case it was typing real pretty. Yeah, yeah, it’s a skill for introverts/girls/other people whose social distance you want to exaggerate so as to possibly help you get sex and cash, but some writers are extroverts. Like Hemingway.

And face it, if you’re a writer at all you’re not a REAL extrovert. So maybe you want to show the real live actual cool kids (the ones you write articles about) that you’re cool too! What better way than to pick on the nerds in video games! After all, you type pretty good.

You land in virtual reality, armed only with your typing skills, surrounded by surreal landscapes and funny looking cartoon characters. And your first impulse is – attract attention! Make noise! Find the other extroverts! Where’s the party?
A couple of days later you have already received a rep as an irritating noob and are on several guilds’ “no invite” lists.

You work your way up through the Chuck Norris jokes in the barrens, the exciting world of twink battlegrounds and the annoying panoply of Trade Chat with all its – other loud people that are even louder and cruder than you . . . and their spelling makes your brain just ache . . . and what’s worse . . . they know how to play the game better than you. Because they're introverts, and they actually like reading stuff like Elitist Jerks, which is sort of like kryptonite to extroverts.

And they mock you. Ceaselessly and tirelessly. You think you know how to type? L2keybind, noob. All that time you spent trying to impress the extroverts, cultivating an appearance? We can’t see it. That “I’ve got a microphone so listen up!” tone? Guess what, everyone’s text is the same color. The deeper you get, the more you find yourself surrounded by introverts, and the more you learn that they feel sort of similarly about you, they're just quieter and less in-your-face about it, unless you try to jerk them around on their home turf or something similar.

Eventually, the electric shocks outnumber the food pellets to the extent that you leave (or get banned or suspended). (Or you go native like I did, but I was a nerd to begin with.) With a burning grudge against video games and all who play them. And nothing left to do with your spare time except try to get cash and sex by selling straw men to peddlers of air.

Meanwhile, a generation consisting of 90% gamers enters college.