Tag Archives: Wil Wheaton

Felicia Day and the Strange World of Geek Girl Gamers

Computer Games, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , ,
When I become really famous, I’m so not dating any of you!

The other day, I was following an argument about one of the comic book conventions when the subject turned to girl gamers, and at first was as I expected: Every guy on the forum was for them. And then the conversation turned sour, really sour. And that’s when it started to attract my attention. At one point, the conversation turned to the subject of Felicia Day, which started out positive, and then it, too, turned negative. And that’s when I started to realize there was something going on that might get missed by a lot of people. Let me explain.

For those of you who don’t know, Felicia Day is an actress who stars in her own web series The Guild, which is about a bunch of really nerdy people who play an Everquest/World of Warcraft-like online, persistent universe game. The characters are quite funny, including an always out of work guild leader, a slacker who works at a run-down fast food place, an overweight housewife who loves the game more than her family, an Asian temptress woman who has no actual skills other than the game, a second generation Indian-U.S. citizen who has a crush on Felicia Day, and of course, Felicia as a semi-employed, overthinking teenage (or older) girl who is addicted to the game but can’t seem to make her real world work out in spite of the online world. Their adventures are somewhat expected, and funny, and every now and then a somewhat famous actor will show up as a bit character in the series (like Wil Wheaton from Star Trek: The Next Generation fame as Wesley Crusher).

Anyway, now that you know a little bit about the web series, it’s probably significant to point out that before this series became famous, Felicia Day was in a few other shows, most notably a small character arc in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series. However, since Guild fame, Felicia Day has started showing up in a lot of other geek-related shows like a prominent part in the last few seasons of Eureka, and Dragon Age: Redemption. For those who are fans of Felicia Day, there’s never been a debate over how her attractiveness has attracted a lot of guys to her banner, especially when she has a tendency to star in geek-related types of shows.

And this is where the debate headed when I caught onto the discussion. One individual pointed out that while Felicia Day may be funny at parts in her series, he also suspected that without the appeal to geekness, there’s a strong chance that Felicia Day would have been ignored as just another semi-attractive female actress when there are so many more attractive ones out there instead. So, the argument morphed into a belief that Felicia’s appeal to geekness is for audience value, not because she happens to be an actual geek/nerd who loves all of the things that geeks/nerds like. Basicallly, the argument goes that she found a niche she could fill and is trying hard to bankroll it as much as she can before someone else more attractive comes along.

Recently, there’s been a pretty large backlash against attractive women who try to make a living off of geek-related appearances, such as comic book conventions where infamous “booth babes” are there to convince horny geek guys to buy the wares of their benefactors. But this has been a complaint for many years, and yet it hasn’t stopped major companies from hiring voiceless babes to sell products to average guy gamers out there.

But the complaint isn’t really even about those types of women. The complaint is about a fakeness of the women who pretend to be geeks in hopes of becoming THE geek girl that guys are interested in. There used to be an old joke at geek venues, where a semi-attractive woman would be considered a goddess at a geek convention but not get a second look at the local mall where so many other attractive women would get even more attention. And there’s something to be said for that.

What’s interesting is that there have been massive appeals to geeks these days in hopes of winning them over with “geek girls”. A lot of television shows are centered around this premise. An example is The Big Bang Theory, which is a semi-humorous show that basically tells the same joke over and over again but changes the wording. It has one generally attractive woman named Penny who immediately becomes the love lust of one of the main characters. And then it becomes the infamous: How can such a geek ever win the love of such a beautiful woman? This subject has been covered ad nauseum by so many other shows and movies in the past, yet the laugh track tries to make it appear as if they’re breaking new ground. The girl who plays Penny is now on the level of supermodel fandom, and to be honest, she’s really not all that attractive, nor is she really all that great of an actress.

We’re starting to see a lot of this concept played over and over again, and each time it happens it becomes more annoying than the last time. Summer Glau, who was the young girl who played the crazy young girl in Serenity (and the series Firefly) has made a name for herself by showing up in all sorts of geek types of shows. At some point, if you were watching something very geeky, it almost became an expectation that she was going to show up at some point. I remember thinking that while watching the abysmally bad The Cape once, and then the next moment, there she was. Attractive girl. Semi-okay actress. But there’s this expectation that somehow she’s now the go to girl for geek shows.

I think that’s becoming somewhat problematic. It’s almost as if really hot actresses are thinking that they can build a career for themselves if they appeal to geek guys that they would never date in the real world. And then when those guys try to approach them at comic book events, they shun them as leppers, proving that they really only wanted the money and fame but really aren’t the geek girls they claimed to be.

With television trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, we’ll probably see a lot more of this n the future. It’s always been my impression that there are actresses out there who would rather skip the hard work of entertainment and just jump into the winning circle, which they seem to think that appealing to geeks will allow them to do. However, when more and more keep trying to become part of the dynamic, it makes it that much harder for the ones who actually are part of that original circle (actual geek girls).

Now, I don’t know Felicia Day personally, but she’s always appeared, at least to me, to be on the surface about being a geek, or part of the geek environment. But the comments of others make it hard to escape the possibility that she might just be part of that cadre of people who saw an easy audience and went after it, while biting their lips about how disgusted they are at the members of that particular audience.

Problem #77 with Adopting Google+

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I’ve been experimenting with Google+ since it emerged, and as much hype as I read from the major news sites, I just haven’t bought into the propaganda they keep spewing out. I keep reading how Google+ is going to replace Facebook, but no matter how much I look into the service, it fails on almost every level. Let me explain:

1. No one is on it.

Oh, I know how they keep claiming a gazillon people are on it and all that, but I’ll let you in on a little secret (if you haven’t used Google+). No one you know is using it. And that’s the problem right there. Sure, it’s great that Felicia Day (creator of the web episodic show The Guild), Wil Wheaton (the guy who played the kid on Star Trek the Next Generation and has been pulling cameos on other shows like Big Bang Theory and The Guild ever since), and Taylor Swift (the singer) are all on it, but what it’s really turned out to be is a glorified Twitter account where you get to actually see postings of these people, instead of blurts of words from their Twitter feed. But again, so few “normal” people are using it, which means if you want to use it to follow some celebrity with a one-sided conversation (where they never hear from you), then it’s fine. But what makes it different from watching some celebrity gossip show? Nothing, really.

2. The Interface Lacks Substance

Everytime I use Google+, I’m convinced I’m missing something because I go on it and then wonder why I wasted the time. It’s like there’s a whole other big room that’s part of it, but I just haven’t figured out the secret handshake to get into that other room. I suspect that other room doesn’t exist, but even if it does, what good is a service if you can’t access it? That’s my problem with Google+. It has nothing going on for it that keeps me interested. I’m a news junkie, which means I want to see things going on. Right now, my Google+ feed is filled with nonstop cute cat pictures from the celebrities that somehow think this is interesting and relevant. I’m not kidding. The only other type of posting seems to be from April Summers who shows naked pictures of herself in Playboy, which can be cool, but not really newsworthy. Every other person I follow seems to practically repeat the same information but a little bit different each time. The people I’d like to follow and know more about don’t actually have an account, or they have an account and don’t use it (like Taylor Swift).

3. It’s Owned by Google

Google is a great search engine, but honestly it doesn’t really innovate in anything. It does a really good job of seeing what other people do and then streamlines it. But there’s rarely any innovation or brilliant thought behind it. Or when there is, it’s designed by engineers who still haven’t figured out how to communicate with the masses, so they set up really complicated environments and expect the people to figure out how to maneuver through them (“I’m looking at you, Google Adwords!”). And there’s always the fear that Google, in their infinite wisdom, will just cancel your account because you disagreed with something they had to say, or do, cutting off four or five services you might be using that had nothing to do with the reason you got shut off in the first place, and like Facebook, they won’t speak to you in order to fix the situation because you’re irrelevant to them, as you’ve always been.

Twitter: The Technology Everyone Uses Yet So Many People Hate

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Recently, I’ve gotten into the whole Twitter thing. Before that, I was strictly a blog guy who swore he would never really get into Twitter. But a few years back, I opened up a Twitter account because I’ve always been one of those “well, everyone else is doing it, so I should, too” kind of guys. Like most people who join Twitter, I followed a few people, waited for the throngs to follow me, realized no one was going to follow me and then just stopped using it. I figured, like so many other people do, that it obviously doesn’t work because it wasn’t working for me.

Yet, since then, a few nations, including Egypt, collapsed because of the use of Twitter. No matter how I tried to ignore the story, it was HUGE, and the fact that this strange technology was used to bring down a powerful dictator really was hard to pretend it wasn’t this massively large elephant in the corner, practically taking up the whole room. So, recently, I decided I would go back into the technology to see if maybe I might have been missing something.

What I have discovered is that there’s a lot of very interesting information that gets shared on Twitter, but you have to be patient to realize it. If you go into the game with the thought that you’re going to get instant satisfaction or quick results, you don’t understand Twitter. And I didn’t understand it. Now that I’ve started to follow a bunch of people, I’m starting to realize that it’s a pretty interesting way to view the world. Therefore, I’ve decided to give some advice to those of you who may be thinking about getting into it yourself.

1. Follow people you are really interested in knowing more about. This is really important because one of the mistakes I was making was trying to “sell” me and then getting people to start following me. It rarely happens. It actually looks desperate, and who wants to follow someone who is the equivalent of the loser in a bar trying to pick up on anything that walks in? No one does. However, what I did start to discover is that because I’m a writer, and I’m interested in all things writing, I’m going to find a lot of interesting people to follow who actually might have useful information. You also quickly discover who is just there to use it as a marketing tool and who is there to use it as a communication vehicle. Some writing Twitterers I followed, like Publisher’s Weekly, have interesting information they share with their followers. Others, which I won’t name cause this isn’t really a “diss” kind of article, weren’t all that helpful and turned out to be really annoying more than anything else. The hardest thing I found myself having to do was unfollow someone, but sometimes, you need to just because the amount of spam that someone clutters up your channel with can be overwhelming, especially when it’s not helpful.

2. Some people are on Twitter because their egos need to be checked. A lot of celebrity Twitterers are like that, and it’s unfortunate. But it also tells you a little more about them and lets you realize that you’re probably better off avoiding them. One person I started following in the beginning was Felicia Day, who is the creator of the series The Guild. She doesn’t Twit that often, but when she does, it’s usually interesting and worth following. About half of what she has to say is interesting. Mindy Kaling, however, who is the girl who plays the Indian girl on The Office, I thought would be interesting and funny to follow. Personally, she’s not. I found her attempts at humor to be really attempts to try too hard to be cool, and pretty soon I’m probably going to unfollow her. An interesting celebrity I’ve been following has been Wil Wheaton, who is the man who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven’t come to a decision on him so far, as I’m suspecting he’s still looking for validation, as I noticed when some of the senior members of the Star Trek franchise were twittering and left him out, and he actually made a bit of an appeal last night, practically begging for attention. He’s an interesting case because he tends to float between a Felicia Day (interesting to follow) and Mindy Kaling (not worth the time). So the jury’s still out on him. However, it should be pointed out that if you’re hoping to be followed by a celebrity, or even have one actually pay attention to anything you write in response, it rarely happens. I used some of my best funny material in responses to Felicia Day, and I was pretty much ignored, which is probably no different than it would have been had I met her in public. Unfortunately, the lowly among us remain lowly.

3. If your goal is lots of marketing potential, then yes Twitter is a great tool to use, but you’re going to have to put in a lot of work and a lot of time before it ever pays off. If you spam your messages into the channel, people will dump you in a heartbeat, which means you have to use the technology to actually communicate. And like most avenues of communication, if you’re only projecting and not listening, people stop listening to you. Granted, the celebrities still get attention because they’re celebrities, but the average person, like me, is only really going to get attention as long as he has something interesting to say. So if you’re just there to build followers, you’re going to have a hard time unless you can provide something interesting to say. I started off with very few followers, and slowly, I’m building a bit of a following, but I’m not fooling myself into believing I’ve somehow tapped into the Duane-amaniacs. Therefore, I have to make sure that what I have to say is as interesting to me as it is to them, kind of like regular writing is. People avoid spam and really want something interesting to read. Otherwise, why follow you?

4. The social implications of Twitter are huge and have already proven themselves to be excellent. Like Egypt discovered, Twitter gives the average person a voice he or she might never have had before. When people were looking for information about Egypt and the revolution, well, that was an audience just waiting to hear what had to be said. Twitter was perfect for that. What happens to that Twitter audience now is probably even more interesting, but I doubt too many people will study that as researchers always look for that pivotal event, not the continued ramifications of a pivotal event that has run through its play in the media.

5. The complainers and the critics. There was an interesting article today on CNN’s site about the 5 ways Twitter changed how we communicate. What was even more interesting were the comments from the readers. Most of them were from what I like to call the old grandfather who lives in the house that no kid likes to go near, constantly yelling, “damn kids, get off my lawn!” Rather than read the article and be interested in the new technology, the haters showed up and posted responses like Shawn777: “Twitter? I don’t even use that crap” and Guest119 ‘s “200 years from now, provided humanity doesn’t blow itself up with nukes, Twitter will not even be a footnote in tech history.” My personal spin on this is that the majority of the complainers are people who tried it out on a weekend, didn’t get a million followers and then figured it was a dead technology.

6. What is the future of Twitter? Who knows? Certainly not me. I’m pretty late getting on the bandwagon as it is anyway. I do know that somewhere down the line another technology will replace it and be the next “in” thing. I’ll probably be late for that one, too. But right now, Twitter is serving as an interesting way to communicate, and as a writer and a communications professor, it’s hard for me to continue to ignore it.

For the record, if interested, follow me on twitter at DuaneGundrum.

We Seem to be Running Out of Good Television Shows

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Recently, I was looking for a good television show to watch on dvd. That’s kind of how I roll these days, watching dvd television series rather than original programming when it actually airs. What I’ve discovered is that everytime I watch a series that’s currently on, they cancel it. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how good it is, it happens to me all of the time. I mean, everyone has their complaint about the demise of Firefly, which was a great show for its time, but every other show under the sun as well gets canceled by today’s television networks. I started watching Star Trek Enterprise. Canceled. Watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Canceled. Jericho. Gone. Jeremiah. Gone before I even knew it. It seems no matter what I watch, it gets canceled.

I guess I could watch stupid shows like Two and a Half Men, but as much as I enjoy poking out my eyes with a spork, I just can’t watch that kind of garbage. An example is the sister show of that garbage one I just mentioned, Big Bang Theory. I bought the first three seasons of it for a pretty good deal at Best Buy, mainly because colleagues at work kept telling how funny it was. I think I chuckled every four episodes, and I finished watching the third season last night. Was not very impressed. It was like someone heard that geeks were funny, didn’t know anything about geeks and then wrote an entire series around what he “thought” geeks might be like if they were actually funny. Throw in a bunch of comic book references and various Star Wars/Star Trek-isms, and that’s pretty much the show. Oh, of course, you have to throw in a few hot females to exacerbate the whole idea that “geeks can’t get hot women” and then we’ve pretty much finished the triad of doom. Like I said, it had its moments of interesting jokes, but overall I keep wondering what happened to that last few weeks of my life. If I went with the premise of the show, it wouldn’t make a difference because geeks don’t have any worthwhile lives anyway, but let’s just say I’m not buyiing their nulled hypothesis.

Which leaves me searching through the Netflix queue hoping to find something, ANYTHING, to watch. I was in Best Buy the other day (when I bought the dvds for Big Bang Theory), and I noticed that Felicia Day‘s 4th Season of The Guild was out on dvd. I kind of wish I would have bought it then, but it was only 82 minutes, and I had been planning to spend a lot more time with a show. Should have bought it then. In case you’re not aware, Day’s series is a brilliant commentary of how actually to do geek humor, as it really gets it right and tells it from the perspective of people who ARE the geeks, in this case a guild of online gamers who have no other lives but the game. It’s completely believable and funny. An interesting ironic point is that one of the recurring characters (who showed up in the third season) is Wil Wheaton, the man who played Wesley Crusher when he was growing into adulthood. What makes it ironic is that he’s also a recurring character in Big Bang Theory, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the few times he was in the show (as Sheldon’s arch enemy because he once showed up the main star of the series for a comic book convention signing) were the few times where I actually found myself enjoyiing the show. In those occurrences, Wheaton played essentially himself as a crass asshole of a person who may or may not actually be a lot like the actor himself, which surprisingly is not offputting, even though you would think it would be.

Unfortunately, I find myself unable to really find any great shows on television anymore. I sat down and watched on Netflix streaming the three seasons of Kyle XY, which was so much like so many other shows it was attempting to steal ideas from, like Roswell, the X-Files and even Buffy. So, until I find something decent, I’m kind of stuck waiting for Smallville to run out its final season before I’m left with nothing but these four empty walls of nothiness where my stuffed animals and I will finally realize we have very little to say to each other and lots of times to say it.