Dear Anon-O-Box,
What do you do if you find a geek-ready girl? One who is not quite yet an uber-geek, but one who’s interested and amenable to things geeky. How can I bring her into the fold without blowing her mind and scaring her away from geeky stuff?
- Gateway Geek
e answers:
Dear GG,
You’re looking for some gateway geek activities! I polled our Twitter followers to see what they thought were some good gateway geek activities to help bring the geek curious closer and closer to true geekdom.
Gateway Geek Activities:
Movies: Serenity, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Lord of the Rings Trilogy
TV Shows: Firefly, The Big Bang Theory
Books: Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
Games: Fluxx, The Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, World of Warcraft, Apples to Apples, Munchkin
Other Activities: Quiz night at the local pub, “intellectual elitism” (not sure how one “does” that, dear Twitter follower)
Also, the lovely J wrote a wonderful post a while back called Meeting in the Middle, which is about activities geeks and non-geeks can enjoy together. Try that on for size, too!
You *can* geekify the non-geek, but it takes time and patience. My DM from Orlando had a non-geek girlfriend who originally through our D&D game was silly and dumb. We broke her in using Inn-Fighting, a fun card game with D&D characters. Later she started hanging around a bit more while we were playing. And eventually, he convinced her to roll up a character to play in a Star Wars game with him. Time, love and patience. That’s all it takes to grow your own geek girlfriend.
Happy dating, geek friend.
About Anon-O-Box
Hmm.. you could definitely include the movie Stardust along with the book. I think the Princess Bride would work well too.
Munchkin is a great way to bring people further into geekdom, but do put some thought into a version of munchkin that your girl will enjoy to begin with. So if she enjoys Pirates, try playing Munchkin Booty and not Munchkin cthulhu (which is way less fun if you know nothing about cthulhu).
We tried playing Munchkin with a first timer and wanted to play something new new so we tried cthulhu so not only did we have a lousy time, we weren’t getting our friend to play again.
I have to say that Player of Games is one of my favourite books ever. In fact, you may have just tempted me to go read it again…
.-= Matt F´s last blog ..How Lethal Do You Like Your Games? =-.