WIRED Magazine’s “Geekster Handbook”

My April issue of Wired Magazine came in the mail (snail mail) yesterday. I think Wired has become too much like a fashion magazine, personally, but it still has some great geek news if you get past the “look at how COOL this is!” stuff.

As I was skimming the pages, I noticed the following headline with a picture of 6 people under it:

“Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground”

Here’s the description of “The Gamer”:

Disposition: High DEX and INT scores, low CHA (thus, the lack of friends). Given to indecipherable insults (”I pwn3d u, n00b!”).
Beliefs: The game Real World has a great physics engine, hi-res graphics, and convincing surround sound, but the learning curve is too steep. Girls should dress like Yuna in Final Fantasy.
Turn-Ons: Spawn points. Haptic back. Pac-Man ringtones. Morgan Webb. Split-screen co-op.

The first thing that crossed my mind when I read that was “WTF?!?” Now, if you think about it, that response goes along pretty well with the description of the gamer. Maybe the author thought he was being funny with these unflattering descriptions, but as a geek that grew up in a time when knowing how to write a computer program was NOT cool and trendy, I was rather insulted. After reading all six of the descriptions, I have to say that it seems that all the descriptions were unflattering, not just the gamer one. So, at least the author was being fair. Still, I always felt that Wired Magazine’s popularity was directly related to the geeks and nerds of the world wanting to read a magazine that talked about stuff that they were interested in. I also think that geeks tend to have a pretty good sense of humor about our uniqueness. Because of that, I felt that this little vignette was somewhat of a slap in the face to the people who make Wired so popular. I can only hope that since I don’t take Wired as seriously anymore because it’s become so trendy, there are others out there who feel the same way I do and are choosing to not take this article seriously, either.