Now Go Away Or I Shall Mock You A Second Time

Alright, disclaimer first: I don’t know John Finkel, I don’t have any particular fanboyism for John Finkel other than a distant sort of reverence for his accomplishments in a game I happen to particularly like (any indicator otherwise in this article is due to some really quick wiki’ing for factchecks, and the fact that his twitter profile’s public), and while I’d certainly pick up his bar tab in exchange for game tips should he ever drop by and play at San Jose’s Superstars/Channel Fireball store (you can hold me to this, Finkel, on the off-chance you’re reading~), this post isn’t about him except indirectly.

It’s all you, Alyssa Bereznak. It’s all you, baby.

Now, I love my current gig with _____ ______ as a QA analyst, but regardless of how great my coworkers are and the still extant glee I get from the occasional re-realization that “YES I AM WORKING IN THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY,” and the surprising LACK of horror stories to share thus far (though Kurtz/Krahulik/Holkins’ The Trenches is only more entertaining by dint of being directly relatable)…

…Mondays still suck.

But you know what solves the Monday Blues? A nice, large, bittersweet slice of schadenfreude pie. And boy did I ever get a serving of the stuff today. See, today, Gizmodo intern Alyssa Bereznak made Public Internet Mistake #2: writing scathing “humorous” accounts using real names – a mistake compounded by the fact that John Finkel is, in the word of The Scout, “Kind Of A Big Deal” (#1 being: GIVING ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION AT ALL ABOUT YOURSELF) He is, in fact, one of the most famous players of Magic: The Gathering – former world champion, one of the most consistent Top 8 placer in the game’s biggest tournaments, and a lifetime earning in the excess of $300k from its competitive circuit – arguably the best American player to have ever graced the game, in fact. In fact, he is so famous, there’s only one other guy that really stands on the same level, and Kai Budde, the German Juggernaut, probably won’t be dating American Gizmodo interns any time soon.

At least, I hope not, for his sake. What a bore that would be. I mean, seriously. I’ll let Ms. Bereznak’s article speak for itself.

Let’s get this straight: I’m not mocking the poor woman for rejecting a gaming legend. I’m mocking her because all she allowed herself to see was: “this guy’s some sort of card game superstar.” And then inquired no further. She backtracks later, even reportedly rewriting her article a bit, in an attempt to clarify her position – but to no avail.

C’mon. “Dweeb?” “Cautionary tale?” Really, Bereznak? Really? This is the language you’re going to use to “explain” your point? Look, nobody cares that you thought Finkel was a dull date – and if you’d left it at that, who would’ve done anything but shrug? His involvement in this whole amusing farce is almost coincidental, minus the fact that it really is his preeminence that caused such a cascade of internet commentary on your otherwise rote little accounting of a dull little meetup.

Oh, but that’s merely the fertile soil upon which your attitude planted such a seed.

The unfortunate thing is that your attitude is entirely prevalent in the public at-large – and you’re even unapologetic. You later write it all off as “Oh, but we all have our shallow side-” a note, I seem to recall, that was appended only after you were mocked thoroughly by a good chunk of the East Coast MTG Twitterati. But that’s hardly an excuse for objectifying and deriding any geek for the hobbies they have. Nothing – absolutely nothing – in your article indicated anything other than a horrified repulsion at the fact that he occasionally plays a collectible card game on weekends. And while it’s adamantly true that we all have the right to set the criteria for whom we’re romantically entangled with, nothing in that implies that it’s also perfectly acceptable to then post on a famous (and occasionally infamous) blog network about how utterly perturbed you were to find that you were on a date with… gasp…

A GEEK.

See, this is what I don’t get. You spend the first half of your post giving OKCers some rightful crap about being creepy social recluses that start to pant heavily at the mere thought of meeting a girl in real life. You are, in fact, justified to feel quite a bit of revulsion at the obvious objectifying and ulterior motivations that plague just about every dating site on the net – even if it is only to be expected, given the internet’s amplification of baser behavior and the natural gender skew of such sites, it makes anybody uncomfortable.

But then you ruin it all by, well, objectifying the guy you end up going on a date with.

But you must have meant to, protests and backpedaling aside. Really. The person that made Alyssa Bereznak look so damn bad and shallow wasn’t John Finkel, whose response to this whole farce was bemused and modest. It wasn’t the MTG (and, surprisingly, webcomics) Twitterers – who’s merely reacting to the bad press heaped onto you. It was the person that wrote that article. That gave Finkel three strikes for occasionally playing a card game, and quite naturally made friends via a social activity that encourages both competition and cooperation. It wasn’t anybody but the writer of “My Brief OKCupid With A World Champion Magic: the Gathering Player” that made Alyssa Bereznak look like a caricature of a shallow and ditzy west coast socialite, and one who hasn’t yet given up the high school clique mindset. It wasn’t anybody but the very writer of that base little article that seemingly set out to perpetrate the idea that geeks should be romantically isolated and derided for having an uncommon passion and talent – that the sole fact he played a game traditionally considered a geek’s pursuit made him persona non grata, regardless of what else was going on in his life.

And last I checked, that writer was Alyssa Bereznak.

You chose to write from the perspective that having a card game as a hobby – one you were by no means obligated to witness for any amount of time – was equivalent to fingernail biting or having a verbal tic. So much so that nothing else could possibly make you two compatible. At least, that’s certainly the conclusion one gets from reading that sordid little blogpost of yours.

And, frankly? You’re right. You two aren’t compatible. In fact, it’s hard to see how you’re compatible with anybody, geek or nongeek. The impression you’ve presented to the world at-large is that of a young, dumb writer too shortsighted and narrow-minded to see beyond her own pretentious internal constructs of a person and to whom that person actually is. He could be a high-level Poker player (he is) or a hedge fund manager (he is) or a cat lover (ditto), as well as the occasional geek, and you would’ve missed all that entirely by solely relying on your preconstructed idea of what kind of a person a “Geek” is.

Whoops. Your loss.

It is my hope, in a moment of cynically shaded altruism, that you outlive that personality flaw.

Until then, go on and keep serving up some of that schadenfreude pie.