50 Signs you Might be a Hardcore Video Game Nerd

These days, the words “dork”, “geek”, and “nerd” are becoming more and more common place, and people are identifying themselves as such more often – even celebrities, whereas this was probably taboo years ago much like “going bald” in Hollywood was taboo, and still is. The word “gamer” is even becoming more common. I can still remember a decade ago it was very uncool to be a gamer. And in some ways it still is uncool. Casual gamers, who play Farmville or Angry Birds, or console gamers are generally more accepted in society. They still get laid, in other words. But especially if you’re a PC gamer, the ever-present stereotype of “basement-dwelling virgin man-child” still persists. It's not as cool to be a PC gamer. And it's even worse if you're a video game nerd.

These are some signs that may indicate why you’re still single and celebrating the holidays on your own this year; the signs of a hardcore video game nerd. You could also consider these the rules to be part of this little asocial club, if that’s what you aspire to.

• You play games in a series in the correct order. This could be order of release, but even more anal-retentive than that is chronological order. So for instance you would only play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl after S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, the prequel to the former, was released. Bonus points for reading books and comics based on the series, and watching movie adaptations too. See Mass Effect.
• Even your game collection has some sort of order. It will usually be alphabetical, but the hardest of hardcore will have it sorted by date of release, or by review score according to Metacritic.
• You insist on formatting the names of games correctly. Abbreviations are strictly forbidden and anyone who does this will suffer your wrath.

• You insist on buying every edition of a game upon release. This means the regular edition, the collector’s edition, the survival edition, the game of the year edition, the ultimate edition, etc. Just like Pokémon, you gotta catch ‘em all.
• All video game action figures that you collect will be kept in the packaging. Other items that aren’t packaged will be put in a display cabinet. They will not be touched, much like you, until your death, and they will then be passed on in your will, not to your children (because you likely won't have any), but to a gaming museum, for the purpose of educating noobs – a duty which you sadly will no longer be able to perform. The world shall mourn your death.
• You spend most of your salary (or pocket money) on every single piece of merchandise that belongs to a particular franchise. A Mass Effect snackwich machine, you say? Bring it on.
• You take it as your duty upon this earth to correct every single incorrect statement that relates to a game, in an attempt to restore balance to the universe – often on gaming forums. Even if it’s a typo.
• You can recite the development history of every single game out of your favourite game developer's catalogue, and know the history of said game developer from the present day all the way back to the day they started off in a dingy garage somewhere.

• Regular people often quote Shakespeare, Yeats, or Wilde. You quote video game characters, and also have these quotes in your signature on gaming forums.

• Photo albums on your Facebook or Flickr have screenshots, often of mundane activities that occur in games, that even have captions in the comments. Bonus points for tagging.
• Your list of great accomplishments in life includes getting a personal best score in Sonic The Hedgehog.
• You base your life experiences off of things that take place in games you’ve played, and relish in telling people about that one time you mowed down a whole alley full of hoodlums with nothing but a spanner before hijacking their sweet ride... twice – when everyone knows that only ever happens in Grand Theft Auto.
• You even have difficulty distinguishing real life from virtual reality, and therefore have a habit of checking in every nook and cranny for power-ups.
• You overanalyse every single thing that occurs in a game, much like a video game Mythbuster, as it were. Some dudes at Kotaku famously did this when they analysed how tall a hay bale would really have to be to break Altair’s fall in Assassin’s Creed. It's because of this over-the-top curiosity that you can actually stay awake during an episode of Gametrailers' Pop Fiction.
  
• When asked who your favourite musician is, ten to one it’s some obscure Japanese video game composer, whose name only you and five other people in the world know how to pronounce, let alone spell.

• You spend a great deal of time writing bad fanfiction, and often find yourself correcting factual errors that were present in the original game, which makes it all sound like it was written by an angry high school science teacher.
• You spend more of your free time editing (read correcting) Wikipedia articles on games and gaming in general.

• At any fancy dress function or event that requires you to dress up, like Halloween, you always arrive as a video game character, and usually it is a character from some obscure Japanese video game, the name of which only you and five other people in the world know how to pronounce, let alone spell. And most of the time, the character is female, too... or at the very least androgynous.
• Your idea of the ideal gaming chair is one that comes installed with a toilet so you don’t need to take bathroom breaks.
• The best present someone ever gave you for Christmas was a pair of Pac Man pyjamas, with matching bedclothes. You were 32 at the time.
• You have more rigs than you do pairs of underwear, and they are all built for different occasions or purposes. One stays at home, and one is packed and ready to go to LAN parties, for example.

• You post status updates on your social networking profile which relate to the game you’re currently playing. Bonus points if your Facebook name or Twitter handle is that of a video game character.
• You’re the kind of guy who didn’t like the ending in Mass Effect 3 and started a petition to get a better ending for it. Hell, you even went ahead and wrote the script for it and made a machinima which you uploaded to YouTube so everyone could see what a masterful director, actor, and general credit to society you really are. You would have acted the scene out, but there was the problem of not having any friends or people who cared enough to take part.
• Much like art critics, you go in to great detail reading things in to a game’s art style and sound direction, when in reality none of what you thought was an intentional reference to some epic film, novel, or other masterpiece was even considered by the developers of said game, and was much to your dismay, pure coincidence. Bonus points if you have created a blog, podcast or YouTube series where you talk about these observations that nobody takes any notice of.

• If by some miracle you ended up getting married (to another human being), you would propose through a video game that you would then force your significant other to play. Some dude famously did this after getting someone to create a level with a marriage proposition in Portal 2. Of course, if you really were a hardcore video game nerd you’d do it yourself because you’d be more than comfortable with map editing and programming. Other popular games that would work for this: Minecraft.

• In fact, from all the messing about with level editors and game making tools, you're more fluent in programming languages like C++ than your own home language.

• You're one of those creeps who would actually resort to using nerdy gaming-inpired pickup lines if you happened to be at a bar, like: "You're like a video game controller, I can't keep my hands off of you."

• Your party trick is to do an impersonation of your favourite video game character. This usually falls flat, seeing as nobody has any clue who you're trying to impersonate. This does mean however, that you always stump the competition when playing charades.

• You have pets named after characters in video games. Bonus points if you have children named after video game characters or even games themselves.

• You have different ringtones, all from games, for different people on your phone. The ringtone when your boss or mom is calling is “The Decisive Battle” from Final Fantasy VI.
• Your answering machine or voicemail message on your mobile has the voice of Duke Nukem provided by Jon St. John himself, who actually will do voicemail messages at a price of about $1 per word, in case you were wondering.
• Your desktop theme doesn’t just stop at a screensaver or a background wallpaper. You have icons, and sounds from games that accompany every movement you make with the keyboard or mouse. Bonus points if you recorded them yourself from the game, or from scratch.
• You’ve modded your PC’s case to look like SHODAN from System Shock.
• Every single gaming magazine and cover CD you have ever bought is stored and ordered by volume/issue.
• Your favourite actor of all time is Dennis Hopper, and only because he played King Koopa in the Super Mario Bros. film. Not because of any of his other films or accomplishments, or anything.
• If you ever got a tattoo (like your mother would ever allow you to do that), chances are it would be Kratos from God of War, or some other grotesquely muscular character, which would probably result in others' doubts about your sexual identity being confirmed, at least in their minds.

• You haven’t bought most games that were released after the year 2000, when Deus Ex came out. To you that was when the pinnacle of gaming was reached and has been on a downward spiral ever since.
• When asked what your favourite vacation destination would be, your answer is something like Emerald Hill.
• You haven’t had a haircut in five years because if you did you wouldn’t look anything like Liquid Snake, your one claim to fame – even though you don’t, at least to everyone else in the known universe.

• You consider it a cardinal sin to miss any gaming expo, like E3. Only death would be a valid excuse. Anything else would be grounds for excommunication from the hardcore video game nerd circle. Any real gamer must make the annual pilgrimage to E3.
• You are known for letting nerdy game or meme references sneak in to real life conversation, like “Boom, headshot”.
• You once got in to a fight, but never again. Not because you had pangs of regret or anything, but because much to your dismay, once you had defeated your foe – likely some lesser video game nerd, and probably over something petty – loads of gold coins did not in fact shoot out of every single one of his orifices.

• You’ve been playing the same games for the last ten years, not only because of the point made earlier about Deus Ex, but because you only ever play games by your favourite game developer (Bethesda, BioWare or Blizzard – take your pick), and would never even think to mention an indie title’s name. You would only play one as a guilty pleasure, and you would consequently feel so incredibly ashamed afterwards, like you had committed adultery with some cheap skank, or something.
• You are the one who arrives first at 3 AM in the morning to camp outside Gamestop to get your hands on a copy of a new game. This qualifies as a night out on the town for you.

• If you were to have an adult dating profile, you would list yourself as a tall, dark orc looking for a fair-skinned elven princess. This worked once, incredibly, but when you set up a date and went to meet “her”, it turned out to be just another (male) video game nerd, and you didn’t even like each other.

• Your favourite genre of game is RPG, and this is for a good reason. It isn’t so you can live vicariously through your avatar, who actually gets outside in the sun every once in a while, but it’s because you just aren’t that good at just about every other genre. For instance, your obsessive compulsive disorder gets in the way with first person shooters, seeing as you can’t ever allow yourself to have a magazine that isn’t full, or an ammo reserve that isn’t rounded off to the nearest ten.
• Most people rush to get Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie’s autograph. You actually know the name of the sound engineer who worked on Dead Space, and carry around a photo of him so that if you ever saw him, you could walk up to him, shake his hand and say “Marvellous job, sir”, before getting him to give you his John Hancock. Easy sailor – not what you were thinking.
• You always refuse alcohol, cigarettes and any sort of narcotic, because it “reduces your mana”. Or there’s the chance that it will interfere with your reactions when it comes to the next game of Call of Duty.
• You have a list of all the people who have wronged you, and take great delight in assigning their names to bots in something like Unreal Tournament where you would probably lose (see earlier point on not being good at FPS games). Or if you don't want a fair fight, you create exact likenesses of them in The Sims and proceed to make their lives a living hell, either by sticking them in a room and deleting all the doors and watching them slowly wither away, or by making them get in a swimming pool and then take the pool ladder out.
• You had one chance to hang out with the cool kids, and you blew it because while out tagging random walls, you spray-painted “I love Marcus Fenix”. Of course they didn’t give you a chance to explain exactly who that is – the protagonist from Gears of War, and not some guy at your school you have a crush on.