Well thats not unique to the gaming community, seems to plague various
fandoms as well. Wether gun fanatics running around in hunter orange and
beer breath or the sci-fi fans, or the dreaded furry fandom fanboy, who
tends to make gamer geeks smell good. At cons where people who don't have
much of a social life in their 'normal life' gather, you tend to have a
higher percentage of the populace that are in poor shape and/or don't have
good hygiene (the two don't always go together, I've seen toothpick guys
who would make a skunk retch, and I'm fat but shower regularly, especially
at cons where I'm running around and usually in areas where the number of
people make it unbearably hot often times). The problem comes when first
timers or outsiders see the less desirables and remember them, forgetting
all about all the more normal ones there. This is an ongoing problem with
almost every subculture out there especially in North America, seems
people in the US and Canada tend to dwell on the negative things in life.
Just my two coppers.
Kele Kravelin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Faustus von Goethe wrote:
> >I bathe daily and after excercise, and brush my teeth more than once a day.
>
[snip]
>
> Their answers can best be summed up with a paraphrasis from one of the girls
> I talked to:
>
> "These guys are disgusting. I don't go INTO [gaming store]
> or go to CON's anymore because of the body odor. It always the
> same - 8 or 9 fat, geeky, middle-aged dorks sitting
> around the table in filty jeans and t-shirts in a cloud of
> their own rancid B.O. Ick!"
>
> This pretty adequately describes about half of the crowd where I used to
> game. I personally never go to CONS except once, and she had it tagged
> there, too. I tell you by Sunday at the one CON I have gone to you couldn't
> go INTO the main gaming room without being knocked over by the stench. Some
> of those game-rooms are SMALL. More than once while running a game at a
> store I reached into my gym bag and tossed a can of deodorant at some
> stinking fiend.
>
> You want to enhance perceptions of the gaming community - introduce some of
> our less-hygenic members to the concept of SOAP!
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