Well, perhaps the title is an exaggeration. I spent the majority of Thursday night fixing the machine of a gamer; I found myself amazed that a nerd would happily run Norton (which was the cause of the problems) on his machine. Is it not amazing that people who spend the majority of their free time online have no clue about software?

A fairly new class of nerd has suddenly become very popular: the gaming nerd. There’s nerds like me (with a relatively good knowledge of technology and all sorts of miscellany); the Napolean Dynamite nerd (who are somewhat lacking, in both intelligence and social skills); the book nerd (amazing knowledge and intelligence but no speciality in technology); and then there’s the gaming nerd, with level 80 WoW characters but nearly no knowledge of technology.

The gaming nerd loves l337, energy drinks, gaming and Windows. Their knowledge of their chosen games is often amazing; but their knowledge of their computer is not. The only aspect of their computer’s hardware of which they remotely understand the specifications is the graphics card (for it is the only piece of hardware they care about!), they don’t know their ROM from their RAM and they cannot do as much as open command prompt. Long story short, they listen to the salesman at PC World and pay the extra £30 for some sub-standard security suite instead of just using AVG like most nerds!

This isn’t to say the gaming nerd has no role to play outside their games. Sites which produce great memes, like 4chan, are populated by this sub-culture of nerd (amongst others naturally) and software like Skype is frequently used by them.

Gaming nerds (generally speaking) don’t understand their best friend. They use their computer for gaming and only know what they have to. They love games; not computers.