I heart geek weddings! part one: my favorite gamer weddings

July 21, 1:34 AMWedding and Marriage ExaminerElizabeth Oakes

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                                   Be my Guitar Hero!
                  image courtesy Henry Chen Photography

Seems there’s a fine line between amusement and meanness these days, and geeky weddings are hot targets for online snarkers.  Though the tone of this MentalFloss.Com article about Star Wars vs. Star Trek weddings is affectionate, others are not so kind. 

I would like to say in defense of All Geeks Everywhere that I LOVE GEEK WEDDINGS.  

This is not because I enjoy poking holes in nerdy weddings like some bloggers (nerds differ from geeks, btw; I don’t snark at either) but because I always have a great time conducting them, no matter what level of geekitude.  Geeks are creative, fun, and--nowadays, in our gadget-strewn world--the four-eyed kings and queens of cool.  They are also absolutely necessary.  My beloved husband is a computer geek, and I have this advice for those of you seeking suitable life partners:  you can’t do better than marrying your tech support. 

Though I married a geek we did not have a geek wedding (I confess we watched an episode of “The Tick” on our wedding night though--the one where Dot marries Dinosaur Neil? That's pretty geeky.)  However, Los Angeles is home to Electronic Arts, Activision, several major digital design, media, special effects, and development studios, so I regularly have the great pleasure of officiating at geek weddings, sometimes in a dual-geek ceremony.

There are many varieties of geeks: fan geeks, science geeks, computer geeks, gamer geeks, gadget geeks;  you probably know one, though if you're not a geek of some kind yourself  it's unlikely geeks will come out of the geek closet to you.   If you suspect someone you know might be a geek or nerd, try dropping a mention of Tolkien, Slashdot, William Shatner, handheld GPS units, Schrödinger's Cat,  Firefly, or BioShock during lunch and see if a glint of geek co-recognition lights up their eyes.  Then be prepared for the details of the geek's particular obsession, and don't be surprised if you become a little obsessed yourself.  Geeks all in their passionate glory can be quite stirring, in their mild-mannered way.

Though I have married folks who have incorporated Harry Potterisms and Ent and Entwife songs into their ceremonies, a larger part of my clientele are programmers of one kind or another.  One of the wonderful things about computer geeks--particularly gaming geeks--is that they are creative thinkers living in a world of possiblity.  They aren’t mired in traditional thinking; they live to amaze us with techno-wonders and they usually don’t share the cynicism of their movie industry counterparts. They tend towards quick and droll humor and many of them--again, especially gamers--love what they do and consume their own products with a passion.   They are awesome clients and I enjoy their intelligent discourse and sense of adventure, be the world analog or digital.

In honor of geeks and those who love them, here are highlights of some of my favorite geek weddings:

•  Using my finely-honed geekdar, I found two geeks milling about in the hallway during a wedding dinner and asked the standard question about how they knew the bride and groom.  They responded that they were friends of the groom, though they’d never met him until this evening.  They had encountered each other online questing through World of Warcraft (the groom was a high-level WoW community facilitator.)  The groom honored these guys he’d never met in the flesh with an invite to his wedding, so they turned out for it even though they lived hundreds of miles away.  The two geeks had never met each other IRL either until the day before the wedding, when one drove across two states to the other’s house in Vegas, from whence they drove down together to L.A.  Though exhausted with driving and revelry, they set out back to Vegas the same night since they had to get back to work (and gaming.)  There is no devotion like geek devotion, as any spouse of a geek will tell you.

•  The XBox 360 groom’s cake pictured here was a gift to a couple that worked at Electronic Arts, and this was the first time ever I saw guys get really excited by a cake-cutting.  Cries of ‘I want the ‘A’ Button!!!” accompanied the ritual; one guest asked if there was any Playstation cake and was roundly booed.

•  Finally, I conducted a ceremony for an ebullient Activision artist which concluded with the bride and groom playing a “Guitar Hero” duet of “Pride and Joy” (and yes, that’s a ThinkGeek 8-bit tie he’s wearing in the photo above.)  Sadly, there was an irremediable cake disaster before the ceremony, so I suggested to the bride that she put some of her “Gears of War” action figures around the tumbled cake and blame the damage on them.  I got a laugh out of her anyway, though the cake was a total loss; woot! My one rezzer move.

That’s the essence of geek weddings: even when the Locust Horde assassinates your cake, take heart.  You have love, life points, a newly-minted spouse, and many exciting years of cooperative gameplay ahead of you.  Have fun, and enjoy the pwning.

 Elizabeth Oakes welcomes your comments and questions at weddingexaminer@gmail.com