Gamer grrlzz!!1

This is a soapbox rant. If you don't like those, stop here.

I don't want this to be a video game blog, but as someone who plays video games both extensively and obsessively, there's not much else for me to talk about unless something weird happens to me in the office or during my commute that triggers a nostalgic reverie to the days of my adolescence where, sometimes, I would round corners at school with my hand to my chest in the vague hope that I might bump into a girl, and my hand would then brush against one of her breasts.
Since it never actually happened, I am not a sex offender, and this makes it perfectly safe to leave me in the company of your children.

Anyway, sometimes I will post about video-game related issues. I will try to make this as interesting and insightful as my earlier posts, which in retrospect seem to mostly involve silently judging people.
Fuck. I really am a terrible person.

I am married. I am fortunate, extremely fortunate, that my wife enjoys video games. The only downside is that I have to share them with her, which divides up potential video gaming time. This is not really a downside, because the potential pool of video gaming time is much larger. Even if I only get to game half the time, this is better than having no time at all, which is what most 28 year old married men have to be content with.

I know it seems unfair, but see how much more videogaming time can happen if you share this hobby with the woman you fuck love?

Thankfully, the hobby is becoming mainstream and attracting more participants of both genders, so blahblahblah I could go on about this and that is VERY BORING AND DETRACTS FROM THE POINT.

The point is many many girls play games, but so do many many boys, and those boys are TERRIBLE PEOPLE.

What is almost equally terrible is the belief by these very same people that everyone is treated equally terrible and that this belief gets perpetuated makes me want to... to... I don't know yet. There isn't a word for it. The media will have to derive a Romanised onomatopoeia from witness accounts and use it enough to have it added to the dictionary before I can adequately express myself.

Whenever a girl complains about mistreatment online, the response about 90% of the time (on forums, message boards, etc.) is that they should just suck it up and deal with it.

The mentality is this: girls want to be treated equal with guys. They play games with us guys, they should be able to deal with the same amount of trashtalk, right? Actually, I believe in and fully endorse this kind of equality. I am totally behind this train of thought. You want to be treated the same, you bear the crosses that go with it.

Here's the problem with that: in reality, girls get treated way, way worse while playing online multiplayer games. If you are reading this and disagree, you are wrong. You are either someone who has never played online multiplayer games, or you are male and completely ignorant. People hide behind a facade of "equality" and use it as an excuse to treat women way, way worse.

I have met with arguments against this and they're always completely subjective, from people (guys) who will act defensively. "Oh but I treat girls the same." and yeah, that's probably true... for you. But not everyone does. Unless you are a girl or play with a girl on a regular basis, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Shut up.

Here is a sampling of things I have been called or had said to me while playing Halo and Call of Duty over XBox Live:

-faggot
-noob
-stupid American (?)
-nigger (!?)

For the record, I'm a Caucasian, straight, Australian male, and only ever get called a 'noob' when I am winning. Insults don't need to be accurate, just loud, especially on the internet.

Here is a sampling of things that my wife has been called or had said to her, or sent in private messages over Xbox Live while playing Halo and Call of Duty:

-bitch
-slut
-cunt
-whore
-fat bitch
-fat slut
-get back in the kitchen
-"why are you playing games instead of lying on your back and making me some money?"
-"Gimme a birthday blowjob" (the guy spent the rest of the game going on about wanting his "BBJ").
-make me a sandwich (hilariously, on most occasions we flatten the team of guys who were loudly demanding "sammiches" and my wife occasionally takes the opportunity to demand a sammich of her very own, because to the victors go the spoils. They left without a word, and I like to think that they now wear pretty dresses and eat mountains of chocolate while watching soap operas.)
There are more I don't specifically remember, but you can see that the list rapidly outweighed the first list.

This doesn't even factor in the pictures of penises she's seen, along with pictures of guys who sent pictures of themselves doing "cool" poses, because I guess that would convince her to go and have sex with them?

This doesn't factor in the in-game ganging up harassment and teamkilling, and the fact that some of the above comments have been added to vandalise the tags for the images and videos of her Halo accomplishments on her Bungie.net fileshare.

After several thousand games of Halo 3/Reach, and several thousand more of Modern Warfare 2, I can say with confidence you have it worse it you are a female. My methods aren't scientific, but my results are nevertheless conclusive.

This is why sites like Fat, Ugly or Slutty are created - in a desperate effort to prove this to the world. Go there and check their hate mail sometime. It's full of guys who persist in claiming that girls don't have it worse than guys, and that girls just complain more.

Some male gamers even claim that female gamers are just as bad when trash-talking at guys! That actually blew my mind. While I don't deny there are girls out there who are capable of being as abusive to the level that my wife or her friends have experienced, I highly doubt that it happens nearly as frequently, else wouldn't I have come across this alleged phenomena sooner? After all, it seems to happen to my wife every time she plays - where's my verbal abuse? I'll believe it when I see it.

Maybe we're going through a period of adjustment, and guys are still going through a period where girls are unfamiliar in their environment. Maybe the majority of male gamers are still so socially inept that they don't know how to behave around girls.

I know there is a strong belief (still!) that any girl playing games is only doing it to get attention from guys, and that therefore don't deserve our respect - that they are simply vapid attention whores and make a big deal out of being "gamer girls" instead of just... girls who happen to play games. I acknowledge these girls probably exist, though the girls I have played against have either been talented players or (assuming they're bad at the game) genuinely having a fun time with friends.

It's distressing though that this stereotype so quickly became prevalent that it's almost inescapable.

Are males so insecure that they can't share their digital playground with females? I know that cyberbullying has become a big thing in recent years, and that people are more likely to act harsh when protected by the far reaches of the internet and a mask on anonymity. This is why children are being traumatised by their peers saying mean things on Facebook when in my day we just beat each other up in person. Is this just an extension of that? Or are there people who actually have the audacity to act like this in real life as well?

Either way, it's small men lashing out at the enigma that is women. And I believe that to these men, women are an enigma. I think these pseudo-macho tirades are solely to mask some pretty complex inadequacies. I don't even think these guys are just frustrated virgins. I think these are men who may even be in relationships, who are just really bad at understanding women.

These are tomorrow's abusive husbands and deadbeat fathers.

This is why I need to have the power of life and death, so that I can freely krngglspnhzzrdns them. Krngglspnhzzrdns them to death, goddamn it.

The creative process

The reason I decided to start blogging was because I had a few thoughts I wanted to get down, to record somewhere before I lost them only to have them pop up in a few months again and be annoyed with myself for the lack of originality. Those ideas have now been recorded, at least the ones I remember. I hoped this would make way for new thoughts, like some sort of lightning rod.
People who know me would say I've a compelling narrator, a competent orator, and generally an all-round adequate communicator. They're likely to say other things, which might not particularly relevant at this time: that I am merciless at Halo, have a head for utterly worthless trivia, and that I am boring as fuck.
Actually, let's explore that last one.

My stories don't go anywhere, nothing interesting happens to me. The terrible shame is that I didn't notice this early on in life and make a decision to work on it. I could heave learned to play an instrument, studied more, had a greater social life, worked harder. I remember when some tweenage guitarist called Nathan Cavalieri was earning accolades for his great skills. He was may age! Maybe a little younger! Why wasn't I "Jammin' with the Cats"? Ok, so the kid's career when nowhere, maybe because being a young and talented guitarist can't hide the fact that no one gives a shit about old-school Rhythm & Blues anymore unless it's central to the adventures of Jake and Elwood on the run from the police/national guard/Nazis.

Shouldn't my envy have been my first hint that I wasn't getting everything I wanted out of life and should work harder? Apparently I can't take a hint. My wife can attest to that - it took about four months of heavily dropped hints for her to get my attention. I think if I'd been any slower on the uptake she would eventually have led me to my bedroom, thrown off her clothes and screamed "take me!".
I might be overstating my own appeal a little bit, but it's true in spirit if not in fact. Besides, this is my blog and I can be an object of frenzied desire if I want.

This circuitous string of half-thoughts brings me neatly back to my point. See? I can't even segue properly! I stay relentlessly on track even when I'm shamelessly padding! If I were a Family Guy writer Seth MacFarlane would probably come down to my office shaking his head sadly and ask why all my episodes were only eight minutes long. Then he would go back to tweeting about how all album covers have hidden penises on them if you look hard enough.

Anyway, the point I was making is tha- hmm, this Appletiser sample I got today is refreshing and all but I don't see me buying this product. Nice try, Coca-Cola Amatil.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I have thoughts, and I have ideas, but they're so stock and expected that there doesn't seem to be any point in expanding on them. I wanted to be a writer but I have nothing to write. I considered being a novelist, but that requires creativity and at least a modicum of originality. I considered being James Cameron since he doesn't need any originality to make money, but nobody likes him.

Deep down, I'm just not James Cameron.

Unspoken communication

When I was working at Kinko's, we became masters of the unspoken word. It was probably the best team envionment I ever worked in (at least until my current job) because there was simply an unspoken understanding. A comraderie that had us working and playing efficiently - thoughts attuned to each other as our communicative abilities were tempered by the heat of customer service.

Sometimes entire thought processes could be shared by the utterance of a single word and the briefest meeting of eyes. Context coalesced into perfect understanding with no further need for reasoning.

Towards the end of my time there, there came a new employee, and to protect the innocent I will call her Donna.

Donna had a weird ass. There's no other way to put it. It wasn't big, exactly. Just... oddly shaped. young Donna was a petite, charming, intelligent young lady. She just had this weird bubble butt thing going on that made it look like she had the kind of comically large padding one might to expect to see on Billy Crystal after his unfortunate experience in Pamplona in the opening credits of City Slickers.

I remember the day she started working. Her father dropped her off, which isn't unusual in and of itself. The weird part was that he came in to introduce himself to everyone who had been inducted into the exclusive club of "people my daughter works with". He was nice enough, but it just drew attention to poor Donna. Most of us hadn't met her prior to her start date, I guess she'd interviewed with the manager and no one had ever really seen her before.
Why was this guy so interested in meeting us all? My mother hadn't accompanied me to anything since my high school orientation.

I think he was there to protect his daughter. I think he was acutely aware of this distinctive characteristic. I can only conclude that he was concerned that Donna would become an object of ridicule because of her strange ass. Maybe his presence was intended as an unspoken warning, that we were to be nice to his daughter. This is like an overprotective mother supplying cake to a class of kids on their child's birthday.

Let me interject here, interrupt the flow of my own narrative to make something clear. I am not criticising Donna. She had done nothing wrong. She was nice. I'm not trying to make a big deal out of the shape of her ass, because hell, I am no fucking prize in the visual appeal department. I'm just stating the facts.
Her ass wasn't offputting, just... irregular. Am I still coming across like a shallow asshole? Ok, probably. Judgement entered. Motion carried. I am rightfully sentenced to your hateful remarks, assuming anyone ever reads this and feels the need to comment.

Here's the thing. No one ridiculed Donna. The whole matter was so weird that no one had to say anything. The first time Donna turned side-on to wave her father goodbye, there it was. Everyone saw it. We averted our eyes. That profile would stay with us forever.

Hours later, I was drilling holes in some thick documents while Marty worked opposite me, doing some binding. Our eyes met. Mine flicked off to the right, and because our respective stations were more or less in the far corner I was pretty much sweeping the entire store.
He smiled, half-shrugged, then bowed his head to his work.  Nothing needed to be said.

The subject was never raised again.

Visual descriptors

I posted earlier about describing a person by race, and the trauma this caused me over the past few years.

Ok, maybe trauma is too strong a word. Mild social discomfort. That's more reasonable, I guess.

While I've come to terms with referring to people by their race (not always convenient if I don't know their race - I once caused offence to a Greek girl by admitting she looks a little bit Lebanese, but whatevs, we were good buddies. It only came up because she asked, because she looked Lebanese enough that people made the mistake. It was on her personal FAQ.
It's for the most part not too difficult to describe someone in those limited occasions where it's necessary to do so... for instance, if you're really shit at learning and remembering names. On the other hand there are times when someone's key characteristic isn't tied in with something noble like their heritage.

Would someone be offended if I referred to their glasses? Maybe not, unless they are nine years old, and I call them four-eyes or something. But that's my individual insensitivity rather than any standing taboo or indiscretion, so I guess it flies. Glasses are pretty normal these days, because we're all using our stupid eyes for stupid visual things like books and video games instead of hunting, gathering, and... whatever else people did before books and video games.

(Shit, what did people do? The world must have been really dull pre-Renaissance. Just saying. Suck it, 14th century! You got nothing on Assassin's Creed... huh.)

But if someone has a weird birthmark on their face or they're fat you might not want to draw attention to these things, unless you're deliberately being unkind, in which case... high five! No, not really. Stop being a douche, douche.

I remember wanting to bleach myself when I was eight years old because a classmate assured me that by the time I was an adult, my freckles would have joined up and I would be orange from head to toe. The possibility was less than appealing to me.
Luckily I had the sense to ask my mother if it was alright to bathe in bleach before just trying it out, and I guess she put me off the idea because I am here twenty years later, writing this, and not dead.

But if you're socially appropriate (and not eight years old) you're unlikely to point out that someone has a big smear on their face that looks like they were scalded by recently-boiled tomato sauce. Or maybe you'll spit into a hanky and say "c'mere, you got something..." and dab at the edges of it. Your efforts will slowly peter out as you realise your error, your diligent scrubbing with gradually slow pace like the jaw of a man who realises that instead of spaghetti, the fork he put in his mouth mostly contained centipedes.
The person will stare at you, their eyes gleaming with shame behind a mask of passive calm. Your face will glow with your own humiliation. Both of you will wish yourselves into death.

Ever ask a fat woman if she's pregnant? Ever ask a well-groomed dude if he loves the cock? Sometimes social awkwardness does not come from within, it is thrust upon us. Be cleansed in the fires of shame, and rise like a phoenix of interpersonal aptitude!

Maybe if you know a guy with a big hairy mole, you'll stop relying on words when you're referring to them. Let's assume his name is Pete, but there is more than one Pete in the office. You're fucked!. You'll go up to your colleague and say "hey Marty, where's Pete?" and he'll want to know, do you mean normal Pete, or Pete with the fat mole? Marty twiddles his finger around his left cheek, as if caressing imaginary three-inch long hairs sprouting from an invisible growth on the side of mole-Pete's stupid face.

You nod, knowlingly, message communicated. Marty is on the same page here, everything is cool, and neither of you were overhead discussing what can only possibly be Pete's parasitic twin, which he feeds with a combination of catfood and pig blood twice a day. Probably.

Racial profiling

I grew up in a very multicultural area of western Sydney. As a result of sharing my entire childhood with Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, African, Lebanese, Indian, Bangladeshi, Aboriginal and the occasional white kid, I've never developed a conciousness for cultural sensitivity. Things just are how they are, and I don't tend to infer anything from that.
Well not really.

Ok, white people bother me. I see a large group of white people, and I assume they're up to no good. This is because I am one, and we're fucking jerks. That's a rant for another day.

The first time I became aware that it's actually possible to cause offence by referring to someone by race didn't really come until I was already (technically) an adult. I was working as a security guard at the tender age of 20, bouncing at a nighclub.

Ok, that's not true either. I wasn't a bouncer. They big guys were bouncers. The coterie of regulars, the 7 foot tall Samoan guys were allowed to stand out the front of the club and call themselves bouncers. At a demure 6'3" white guy with glasses, I only had the option of patrolling the back part of the club, the regular non-dancing part of the bar, which included the poker machine room. My primary job was making sure people didn't try to sneak in through the fire exits. Fights seldom broke out.

At some point during my first night on the job, a Lebanese guy came up to me and asked where he could find the owner. Now if I was a competent security guard, I might have balked at telling a perfect stranger who and where the owner was. There's a good chance that he was up to no good and was not seeking out the owner to tell him how fond he is of the establishment.

But none of this occurred to me, so I glanced around and said "oh, he's a short white guy...". My inquisitor held up his hands defensively, as if I had just offered to feed him broken glass.

"Whoa!" he said smoothly "Watch it with the racism, kid!".
I hesitated. Was he fucking serious?
"But," I protested "He is a short wh-".

"Never mind, I'll find him myself.". Lebanese guy wanted nothing more to do with me. I felt dirty. It bothered me all night. I went home, slept on it.

Overnight, my cultural apathy was flipped upside down. Without being consciously aware of it, I pledged never to refer to someone by race ever again.
99% of the time, this wasn't an inconvenience. 99% of the time, there's no need to describe someone visually. If I drew a venn diagram to demonstrate this, it would be a single purple circle.

I carried on for seven more years like this, trying not to look too ashamed when someone uttered a racial descriptor in my presence. I felt like I was trapped in that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is dating an American-Indian woman and shies away from works like 'reservation' in fear of reducing his chance of scoring with his femme du jour.

After a brief stint at Kinko's and EB Games, I took a job in a corporate environment, and all my interpersonal dealings were with coworkers I came to know by name. It didn't matter that Tien was Vietnamese and Paul was Romanian (and looks exactly like Agent 47 from the Hitman series of video games), because if I needed to speak to Tien I knew where her desk was. I was finally away from strangers and no longer reliant on my descriptive vocabulary.

I took a new job recently, working in an office of maybe 120 people. I am ashamed to admit that in the last six months I have learned less than 20 names. I know the people on my team. I know my boss, and his boss, and his boss, and even his boss, who is the regional managing director. These are useful to know.

Sometimes I run into strangers in the kitchen who know my name and I don't know theirs. This is ok, because  I never need to refer to them, so they can continue being strangers. It's cool.

Then this happened:

I have this (mis)fortune of sitting next to the IT guy at work, and this apparently makes me his fucking secretary. Several times a day if someone has managed to lock themselves out of their PC or wreck their company-issue Blackberry, they come to his desk. If it's empty, this is where I come in.

Stranger: "Where's Mark?"
Me: *blank stare*
Stranger: Can you tell him I was here?
Me: ...sure?

Then they leave. I hope they'll find Mark on their own, or come back in a few minutes when he returns to his desk, and my involvement is moot. Sometimes however I'm actually paying attention and Mark gets back. Social obligation neurons in my brain flare to life.
Me: "Hey Mark, there was someone looking for you."
Mark: "Who?"
Me: "Uh..." *pause*
Mark: "Ok, what'd they want?"
Me: *blank stare*
Mark: "What did they look like?"
I can feel shame creeping into my face as my eyes dart around the office, hoping that person turns up at that moment. They almost never do.
Me: "Tall... guy? With a blue shirt? And kind of wild hair. Glasses! He had glasses!"
Mark: "Asian?"
Me: "...yes. He was Asian."
Mark: "That's David. His laptop is..."
I tune out the technobabble. Actually, nothing Mark is saying is complicated or overly technical, but I don't care what Mark's job entails right now I have assimilated more pertinent data.
Me: "His name is David."
Mark: *blank stare*

So, I've decided if a dude is Asian, I'm gonna say so. It's just easier, and it's not like I mean anything by it, right? Time to call a spade a spade.

Ok, maybe that's a bad example.