The Truth Behind the Fanboy and Why They Exist

Part 6: That Whole Emotional Brain Thing...

Brain areas responsible for emotion, touch, satisfaction, and memory are involved in our reactions for sex and brand loyalty as well as religion, so when the initial results of the research conducted by Barry R. Komisaruk, professor of radiology at Rutgers University, did not turn up conflicting data that was not really a surprise; they were not expected to.

What was a surprise is that after the data relating to sex and orgasm were quantified for study, when they were compared to the data that was gathered for the study of the brain and its reactions to brand loyalty and fanboyism it turned out that like religion, there were a surprising number of shared areas.

As one of the first people to map the female orgasm via MRI machine, Komisaruk began to generate data that was applicable to research beyond the dewy and fascinating matter of how women achieve sexual pleasure, tumbling directly into the path of the money train that is Madison Avenue and the world of advertising and marketing.

There is only so much money available annually for purely medical research, and only so many sources for funding for such research, but say you can reveal the secrets of how the brain can be manipulated to achieve product desire and brand loyalty and you had better have a truck with you to haul the money back to your lab! If that sounds overly cynical to you, you do not understand business and marketing, because manipulating the mind and your emotions are two of their primary concerns.

If your encounters with fanboys (and increasingly fangirls as girl gamers grow more confident in their place in the gaming culture and increasingly reveal their true gender to their guildmates and playmates online) often leaves you angry or frustrated with them, at least you now know who to blame: the advertising executives and the people who create the ad campaigns that give birth to those fanboys.

Considering that sex and religion are two of the most powerful emotional triggers affecting humanity, it is mildly disturbing to discover that our choice of music player, notebook computer, and video game console has roots in the same basic areas of thought and emotion, but this certainly goes a long way towards explaining the often extreme reactions that are commonly encountered when your favorite video game console is the topic of discussion...

The perennial issue of the fanboy and how to react to or deal with them has long been an open question for most gamers, especially when they are people you either cannot avoid, or regularly appear within the pool of gamers that are your regular game play companions and so do not necessarily want to avoid.

For most humans the idea of solving a problem, and especially a problem that engages them emotionally, is not so much a matter of understanding the underlying cause of a problem, but rather the steps that are required to make it stop or go away. Years have been spent debating in online forums the best way to deal with fanboys, and until recently the obvious answer to that question was to either avoid them or block them from interacting with you -- but now that we understand what the actual cause is behind this nefarious and annoying phenomenon, we can finally point to the real solution...

The only question that remains unanswered at this point is simply this: now that you know that the source for your strong feelings -- and even emotions -- for one console over the other are in fact a product of emotional manipulation, will you continue to allow it to focus your opinion and your values?