Last Wednesday, I made my usual visit to Penny Arcade, little suspecting that I was about to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that the earth is doomed. But I regret to inform you that the apocalypse draws near. A company called GameCrush is making money by charging guys for the privilege of playing games with attractive women over XBox Live.
Look, GameCrush users. Here’s the thing. There actually are plenty of women who would play Halo with you for free, if the guys on XBox Live stopped acting like such creeps. Any woman on a game server whose username or profile picture indicates that she’s a female will be instantly inundated with annoying friend requests (“u sound hawt, r u hawt???? friend mee!1!”), sexually explicit come-ons, and sexist garbage from guys who think video games are their turf and girls don’t belong. Guess what? None of these things make us want to talk to you. They make us cancel our XBox Live subscriptions.
So instead of paying money for what is essentially a glorified phone sex line, you could, I don’t know, work on improving your interactions with women you’re *not* paying to talk to you. They are out there! Just avoid saying any of the ten things on Hawty McBloggy’s list, and you’re already several standard deviations above the mean on the gamer behavior bell curve. If you really want to contribute, start calling your friends on it when they say the things on the list. Then maybe female gamers won’t feel quite so compelled to hide behind usernames like “FrankBobJones42,” eschew the use of profile photos, and/or close their accounts in exasperation.
