Kill Yr Goddess
A lot of game-related dreck hits my inbox. Yesterday I got a press release announcing the Southwest Video Game Expo, whose star attraction is the Goddesses of Gaming: four gals as virtually deadly as they are artificially beautiful. (Their photos are here. Go ahead, look. I know how it is.)
What makes them Goddesses? Well, take Erika Hollings:
Erika is a hardcore gamer and is very proud of her level 78 Paladin in WOW. She also says she will take anyone down in Tekken.
Level 78? 78? Lich King shipped last fall, and she still hasn’t dinged 80?
The Goddesses will be on hand to play Tekken, Wii Sports and ah, Pac-Man. (At least it wasn’t Ms Pac-Man.) You, that’s right you, can get within 50 feet of them, if you can bring yourself to fly to Dallas. Unless the concept of just sitting down and playing a game with a regular, red-blooded girl is dangerous, alien and scary as all damn.
What really bugs me about the Goddesses, however, is the idea that they’re champions of some kind - the ones who were crowned, the ones to beat. It reminds me of why I hate competitive gaming.
Truth be told, I don’t know much about the sport. I don’t follow the leagues, and the few times I could have watched it on TV, I didn’t. (I am vaguely curious about the Sci-Fi Channel’s new gamer reality show, GameQuest, but only to keep my snark hopper full.)
I respect that champions emerge from gaming, and they deserve their accolades. I’m pleased and sure, jealous that they live off endorsements and dedicate their days to the finer points of looking like an ass to score style points on Guitar Hero. But the slope from amateur to pro is still blurrier in gaming than in basketball or hockey. The top players online use the same software as the rest of us. They log onto a server and rack up their headshots just like anybody else. We don’t need an arena, we don’t need organized leagues, we don’t even need to carve off a playground: we’re all on the ‘net together, one giant swarm of ants scaling a hill to knock off the champion of the millisecond.
The more I think about it, the more I think gaming leagues are a step backwards - a vain attempt to Jam a heirarchy down the throat of the most egalitarian competition in the world. Kill your alpha geeks. Kill your Goddesses. The only diff between you and whoever’s the champion of gaming is that they’re a better shot. So get out there and practice.
10/02/2009 at 8:48 pm Permalink
From that SVGE website, I’d say about the only difference between those “Goddess” and the regular girls I know that game is that my friends don’t look to need nearly as much airbrushing.
11/02/2009 at 4:58 pm Permalink
See? I knew you’d look.
12/02/2009 at 5:05 pm Permalink
This is no different than say, The Frag Dolls, except that maybe the Frag Dolls are a bit more hardcore about their gaming, and as previously mentioned, far less airbrushed.
This is hardly a new phenomenon, and it really just goes right back to Emma Peel and beyond if you think about it.
12/02/2009 at 9:15 pm Permalink
What a great perspective. Those so called ‘leagues’ do seem a bit needlessly tacked on often enough, don’t they.
16/02/2009 at 7:10 am Permalink
The odd thing about game athletes is how short lived their careers are. As soon as a sequel comes out, they have to work just hard to learn every tick, bug, and level. Most of them don’t have the kind of energy it takes to keep dedicating yourself to pro levels every time.
05/10/2009 at 10:07 pm Permalink
The things I find while googling myself…
To defend my gamer honor, I never said I was hardcore. They picked that word not me.. I was 80 before the press release was out, I got behind because when WOTLK came out I was modeling in the Virgin Islands, and that ended my 30 hour a week raiding habit and I was never hardcore at WoW again.
But come on, airbrushed? Those pictures weren’t even that flattering.. I look alot better than that when they airbrush me.
Still sad that SWGE didn’t go off.. but I did get to be a Quakecon Girl, where I got made fun of for even playing WoW, let alone not being hardcore enough.
http://www.charismaplus2.com
15/03/2010 at 12:20 am Permalink
I was intimately involved with the organization of SWGE. Because we were appealing to all types of gamers, we wanted our ambassadors to represent many different angles of the gaming. Not only did we want the girls to be attractive, but to also have a certain personality that gamers in the Southwest could interactive with.
In Erika’s defense, the photos were not airbrushed. Erika was going to be our head ambassador, and not only is she beautiful in real life, but she could “talk the talk” when it came to gaming, especially WoW. In reality, the photographers used for the photo shoot were amateur, and the resulting photos did not do our models justice. Erika was a pleasure to work with, was extremely flexible, and was excited to be a part of SWGE. How many times have you gone to an expo and the girls are just stuck up and don’t want to interact, or really don’t care about gaming?
Unfortunately, the show was cancelled due to economic reasons, but we did our best, and no one should criticize the efforts of SWGE or the ambassadors for trying to bring a quality show to the Southwest.