Gamer Girls

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXVuMiHhHf0

3:33:00 – After complaining about a guy who said “VOD”, Mike made the following observation:

You know what else bothers me?  When I’m playing a game, and I do something good in the game, and you know what people say in the chat?  They go, ‘”gg”.  Like, does that mean — is that “good job”, which would be “gj”?  Are you saying, “good game”?  Because if you’re saying, “good game”, who says, “good game”?

Imagine if it was the 90s.  I’m going to go back to this again.  You’re sitting next to your friend and you’re playing Super Mario World.  You’re playing the game and then you beat the game.  You turn to your friend and you go, “good game”.  Like, what are you, a caveman?  “Good game.”  Who says that?  Who says that?  “Good game”.  

You know who says that?  People in the 1990s.

How can he be this clueless?  This was common internet nerd terminology in 1990s online video games.  

I used to play Team Fortress Classic and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II online.  You’d see this shit.  When the game ended, people would say, “gg”.  Not just in that uber nerdy Star Wars shit but also in the slightly less nerdy Team Fortress Classic.   

You’d see it everywhere.  You’d see it on the Microsoft Zone platform where you’re playing cribbage or chess or whatever with some other nerd.  When the game ended, the person would say “gg”.  

In these first or third person shooters, there would be a long list of people saying “gg” at the end of the game.  Some people would spam it as a sort of joke.  

It gradually fell out of favour as people preferred calling the other players “faggots” or saying that they “pwned” you or that they “raped” you or whatever.  The culture of the player base became cruder.

But in the 1990s, people were still interested in netiquette while surfing the Information Superhighway, so they’d say “gg”.  “Good game”.  It’s comes from something that people would say in real life sporting events.  

I played organised basketball in school.  Poorly.  After every game, you’d have to slap the hand of every player on the opposing team and say “good game”.  You’d see it in every sport.  Baseball, pool, darts, whatever.  “Good game”.  

Has Mike never done any of this?  How is it possible?

The first time I saw “gg”, I thought it was stupid.  I didn’t like any of the internet abbreviations.  “LOL” and “ROFL” and whatnot.  And the punctuation smiley faces like 🙂 and whatnot.  I thought that it was all stupid, internet nerd bullshit.  So I didn’t use them.  I didn’t use any of this stuff.  I never said “LOL”, I never said “gg”, I never made a punctuation smiley face.  None of this.  Because I thought that this was for nerds and that the internet was for nerds.

I was right.  That stuff is for nerds and so was using the internet.  But I was using it.  I was playing this Star Wars game on the internet in the 1990s.  It doesn’t get any nerdier than that.  I wasn’t above these nerds, I was one of them.  I should have just embraced the whole culture.  

In any event, this was over 20 years ago.  I got over it.  I don’t denounce people who want to say “gg” or “lol” or use emoticons or whatever.  

“GG” has definitely declined, though.  Maybe it’s just the games that I’m playing.  I don’t really play games online any more.  Team Fortress 2 was the last multi-player online game that I played and I quit about two or three years ago.

But I remember maybe ten years ago or even longer, some guy in Team Fortress 2 lamenting the fact that people don’t say “gg” any more.  He was harkening back to the days when people would still say “gg” after a game to show your appreciation to the other player(s).  

One problem with online video games of the era, and probably still today, is people would quit if they were losing.  It’s poor sportsmanship.  So if you stick through a game, even if you lose, you still deserve a “gg”.  It’s how it works in grammar school athletics and it’s how it works on internet video games.

There used to be a good Jeopardy game in the late 1990s or early 2000s.  It was free.  It was a browser game.  There was also a Wheel of Fortune game that I would play.  You got to design your own little avatar and you could make your avatar smile or frown or whatever at the press of a button.  It was cool.  Then they got rid of it.  But yeah, people said “gg” after games there.

There was also a word game, I can’t remember the name of it, but everybody would get a list of words and you had to arrange the words to make a sentence.  Then you would see everybody’s word and people would vote on the funniest sentence.  It was all anonymous, so you wouldn’t know who wrote what sentence until the voting was over.  I really liked that game and I was good at it.  Everybody would try to do lame sexual sentences, even though the words they gave you obviously tried to make it so that you can’t do that.  I kept it clean and still kicked everybody’s ass.  My best sentence was, “That bird smiled.”  Short, simple, and funny.  I remember some guy said, “I love it when birds smile.”  Anyway, people would say “gg” after the game.

Mike continues, “I’ve never heard anybody say it.  Ever.  Lit?  (laughs).  It’s a sports term?  Well, there you go.  I’ve never heard it before.”

I don’t know how it’s possible.  Forget about the sports aspect, IT’S A VIDEO GAME TERM.  FROM THE 1990s.  

Was he just too busy playing Super Mario Bros on his mother’s couch?  The term was definitely in wide use up until at least 2005.  It’s still obviously used today, as referenced by the chat using it.  Somehow this has all passed him by.

He does seem to have almost no experience with first or third person online shooting games.  In a stream from about a year ago, he was playing an online first person shooter with Bitch Duo.  It was a Star Trek game.  And Bitch Duo said that he got “telefragged”.  Mike didn’t know what this meant.  

But it’s not even a term just used in first or third person shooting games.  It was every game.  I gave examples of the wide variety of games where one could find “gg” being used.  It was everything.  Every game on the internet against a human being would have “gg” being used.  Mike never saw any of this.

How has he avoided online video games his entire life?  Just likes James Rolfe, he hasn’t moved on from Super Nintendo.  Mike stopped playing video games at the SNES.  It’s the only explanation.  

And as for sports, I have absolutely no interest in sports, I’ve never watched a single game of anything, I hated organised sports, but I still did something.  I played grade school basketball.  How did Mike totally avoid all of this?  What were his parents doing?  I didn’t want to do this shit.  I don’t recall being forced but I was encouraged to do it.  

God, I was so fucking bad.  The worst player by far.  I couldn’t dribble at all, my shooting abilities were really poor, and my passing skills were marginal at best.

I think that I was reasonably okay at defence.  I was able to get the ball from the other team a few times.  Then somebody from my team would come over and take the ball from me because I literally couldn’t dribble and my passing skills weren’t good.  So if I had the ball, I just couldn’t move at all.  Somebody had to walk over and take the ball from me.

I only scored in one game.  We were against the worst team in the league, we were ahead by like 50 points, and the coach told the team to give the ball to me so that I could shoot.  So that’s what happened.  As soon as somebody on my team got the ball, they would pass it to me and I’d shoot.  I managed to get three shots in for six points total.  

This was my athletic career.  I was also did taekwondo and karate and I was way better at those things but as far as team sports, this basketball thing was it.

Oh.  I also did track in grade school.  Not a team sport, really.  Yeah, I wasn’t good at this either but it wasn’t embarrassingly bad like with basketball.  It’s just running.  The 400 meters was too far for me.  I’d get winded.  And I wasn’t fast enough to do the 100 meters.  So I did 200 meters.  Is that even an event?  Let me look this up.

Yeah, it is.  I thought that maybe it was just something that they made up for grade school track.

So that was the track part.  As for the field, I wanted to do high jump because I was reasonably tall but the coach declined.  So I did long jump instead.  I wasn’t good but I wasn’t getting last place.  There were surely some fat kids who I was beating.  

Discuss was fucking awful.  I could barely even pick the thing up.  Shotput, forget it.  We would practice in some parking lot and it was just so terrible.  Why make me do things that I’m clearly not suited for?  I can run short distances and jump.  Fine.  Do that.  Don’t make me hurl heavy objects.  Work with what the kid is suited to do.  Give the fat kids the shotput.

I was good at badminton, though.  I played a few times in ninth grade gym, just messing around after class.  I don’t think that there was a team, though.  Not for boys, anyway.  Maybe I could have joined the girl’s team.  I’d be sort of like a pioneer.  They allow girls to join boys teams now.  I would have crushed those girls.  Well, maybe not.  But that would have been a fun thing to do.  It’s too bad that there’s a gender bias around badminton in the US.  I think in Asia, it’s totally normal for men to play badminton at an elite level.