Girl Gamers and You

There are no girls on the internet. This, I have been assured by the denizens of the web, is true. Obviously, it's not, but where are female gamers?

All around you, actually. That guy that just killed you in Call of Duty with a shot to the head? Girl gamer. Team slaughtered in League of Legends? Might've been a lady with mad rushing skills. Just resurrected in World of Warcraft? Yep, your healer could be a lady.

So just how wrong is the "no girls on the internet" statement? Well, according to CNET, a survey showed that 64 percent of online gamers are female. You read that right, over half of online gamers are female.

But how is that possible? It seems that the aforementioned Call of Duty is populated by 12-year-olds who are just waiting to insult your mother. Yes, there are a few female gamers - one of my friend's fiance loves to play Call of Duty, and my guild leader in Guild Wars is a middle-aged woman from New York - but you find most of them playing casual games. Ever hear of Farmville?

Brittany Bradley, the online photo editor at the State Hornet, Sacramento State's newspaper, said that she doesn't play online games like Halo because she has trouble manipulating the controller, which has dual joysticks.

"I have trouble running and shooting at the same time," she said. "I have trouble identifying which players are on my team. In a split second, from 20 feet away, you can't tell which is blue team and which is green team, and then your best friend gets angry for killing them."

Even more than that, though, Bradley thinks video games are simply not productive.

"It's a waste of time," she said. "I could be doing other things."

While the female population of shooter games like Call of Duty and Battlefield may be low, offline games like Angry Birds and The Sims 3 have found a large female consumer base.

My girlfriend, Alex, spends much of her free time playing the Sims, for instance. This is how I know the new expansion for the game, which introduces pets, came out last week. She spends just as much time on the fashion of her characters and the designs of their houses as I do shooting people online. To be fair, though, she also plays Guild Wars, which brings me to my last point.

The Massively Multiplayer Online world has sucked in females far more than other types of online games, save for casual. The role-playing games, or RPGs, like World of Warcraft, Aion, and Guild Wars see many women playing. It can be much slower-paced than shooters, and there is a certain sense of camaraderie between players. Alex logs on to Guild Wars sometimes to just chat with other guild members, and not to do any actual playing.

So to refute the claim that there are no women playing video games, they are actually all around you. They may be killing you but not announcing it over chat, or they could be shooting birds at pigs, or they could be healing you; they are just not as loud and obnoxious as the prepubescent name-caller.

T-shirts for nerds

I recently started watching Game of Thrones, the smash hit show based on A Song of Fire and Ice by George R.R. Martin. I was looking around for T-shirts based on the show, to declare to the world my new fandom, when I discovered two things: People are really creative these days, and I now hate websites that only sell shirts for a single day.

See that image I posted above? That's a T-shirt design. Take a moment, drink in how awesome it is. It combines the tagline from the show with the genius idea of making Ned Stark, primary protagonist, a weather forecaster. Who thinks of these things?

What's more, there's all manner of shirts on websites. Ghostbusters as Victorian-era steampunk "Spectral Smashers?" Check. Shirts as fake advertisements such as the "Save the Clock Tower Fun Run" from Back to the Future? Check. Combining two different geek fandoms to form a Portal/Dr. Who mashup? You best believe it.

In fact, that last one is today's shirt. What? Today's shirt? What does that mean?

Head over to Teefury, and you will see the aforementioned shirt. But, it's only on sale today. Teefury, along with a few other websites much like it, sell a single shirt design each day, often for only $10. Sure, you can find some of the shirts sold at RedBubble, but the price is often double or more. The tradeoff is that you can't pick the color of the T-shirt at Teefury, while you can at RedBubble.

The problem also arises when looking at the archives of what Teefury has sold. The whole one shirt, one day thing sounds pretty neat, having a limited-print shirt, until you realize how awesome some of the old, never-going-to-be-sold-again shirts are. Too bad, if you failed to buy it on the one day last year when it was sold.

Much like Teefury, Ript sells a shirt design each day, but also offer hoodies, kid's shirts, and onesies for newly-created humans. Prices are a tad high for everything but the plain shirt, however.

There's one more model of geeky T-shirt buying on the interwebs that is out of the norm: The Woot Model. Woot, a family of websites that sells things at discount prices for a day, is somewhere between the fleeting Teefury and the more permanent RedBubble. It sells a shirt each day, but keeps a backlog of the 20 most popular shirts. Every week, numbers 11-20 are eliminated in what they call the Reckoning, voted on using your wallet.

Shirts in the Reckoning are $15 plus shipping, and only last as long as people keep buying them. There is a grace period for new shirts, but chances are, they will soon be gone. In this way, a shirt featuring a binge-drinking Cookie Monster - it's milk - has been sold for an amazing 110 weeks as of this writing.

All in all, it's become easier to show off a nerd's love of a TV series, movie, book or videogame - or a mashup of any of them - with T-shirts. The artists have made shirts that will make any fanboy or fangirl laugh and don the shirt, provided you are able to buy it in time.

Now, if you will excuse me, winter is coming, and I need some new clothes.

You occupy Wall Street, I'll be productive over here

The Occupy Wall Street movement, while having noble intentions, is much like the movie The Wild Hunt - it seems pretty good in the beginning, fizzles out, and then just leaves you wondering what happened.

Before I go any further, I must warn you: I am going to spoil the plot of the movie. Chances are, you don't care, and you will never watch the movie anyway, but I figured a fair warning was in order.

The plot of The Wild Hunt is that Erik Magnusson is losing his girlfriend, Lyn, to a guy at a LARP, or Live Action Roleplay. It's kind of like D&D, but acting all the parts out with foam swords over a weekend in the woods. It's a pretty big deal in some circles, as it is in the movie.

Anyhow, without going into much detail, Erik, with the help of his brother Bjorn, are able to convince Lyn to switch sides, "kidnap" her, and destroy the big event planned for the weekend. This, evidently, angers the group playing antagonists of the event, who then proceed to lose their minds, actually rape people, and kill Erik. As in, the main bad guy's lackey slices Erik in the face with elk horns and slams his face into rocks, until he is dead. And then Lyn jumps off a waterfall. And after the event is over, Bjorn takes a hammer to the main antagonists head.

If that left you confused, don't worry - I was too. A really good movie turned super dark in the last 20 minutes of the film, totally ruining an otherwise good movie. And, that last 20 minutes really didn't make much sense. Starting to see where I'm going with this?

Occupy Wall Street (and the local version, Occupy Sacramento) are much like the movie. Starts out with a pretty cool idea, 99% of people are not rich and demand something from the 1% who are super-rich in the nation. That's all fine and dandy, people need money.

But Warren Buffet, that mega-rich guy you've probably heard of, was already advocating more taxes on the rich, and taxing money earned from investments more. The ball is already rolling on that one.

So what is there to protest? Well, that's the part that no one really understands, even the two main websites for the movement, Occupy Together and OccupyWallSt.

This popular picture of David Silverman reacting to Bill O'Reilly telling him he can't explain why the tide goes in and out without God sums up my reaction to the whole thing.

There's no real list of demands, there's no real thrust of the movement to get something done, they are just milling about, demanding food from local businesses - which seems to go against getting the working man some money - and really are only making demands that they not be arrested for camping in Central Park (or Cesar Chavez Park, locally).

So what are the protesters getting done? Nothing, really. It's just a mass of discontent people with funny signs. It's like the Rally to Restore Sanity, only I have yet to hear about celebrities giving speeches in Central Park.

I've heard people around the water cooler say that this could be the start of a revolution, and that the people are going to take America back. Somehow, I doubt this is what the outcome is going to be. It wouldn't make any sense, just like The Wild Hunt's ending. For that matter, what's happening now doesn't make much sense. It's a protest without a real goal or aim.

So while the protesters are busy trying to camp in parks and not actually make demands, I'll be busy at my desk, watching movies on Netflix or finding some way to be a productive, contributing member of society. Just be sure to let me know if the bankers are coming, the bankers are coming!