Please note, the following contentNot the author's self-introduction, nor have I installed cameras in anyone's home—
Your name is Li Xiaohua, and you are 10 years old.
You were different from the kids around you. Two years ago, while everyone else was playing marbles, metal tags, and trading cards downstairs, you learned to sneak onto your family computer. You opened "Seer" on 4399 earlier than your friends and were the first to own the limited-edition elf Brook.
Now, even little kids are playing "Seer," but you've lost interest in this game for children. You've heard about a game called "League of Legends" that just launched its open beta, and all the older guys at the shady internet cafes play it.
You used your 2Mbps slow connection to download all night, finally installed it, and played a couple of matches. As expected, having never played "DOTA" or "Chenghai 3C," you were mercilessly crushed by the older kids on the other side. The mid-lane player cursed you as an "elementary schooler" and even called your chosen character, Darius, the "Hand of the Elementary Schooler."
Frustrated, you uninstalled the game and went back to playing "Seer." But then you were mocked again, told that people who play "Seer" are elementary schoolers, people who play CF are elementary schoolers, and people who play "Minecraft" are elementary schoolers.
You can't talk back because you are indeed an elementary school student.
Later, you entered middle school.
The homeroom teacher warned parents that the high school entrance exam streaming is a huge net; if you get filtered out and end up in vocational school, your life is basically set. Therefore, you could no longer play on the computer as often as before. Instead, you became obsessed with listening to music, especially the latest and trendiest electronic music. The first time you heard it, you felt electrified—This is true music.
Don't laugh; I was genuinely obsessed with Alan Walker back then.
Your favorite electronic music artist at the time was Alan Walker, and the song you looped the most was "Faded," later commonly referred to as "Alan Walking Person" or "Airuck." You and your friends who loved watching "Tokyo Ghoul" and "Parasyte" were collectively known by later generations as "Jiahao."
You can't talk back because you genuinely loved Alan Walker; he was the first electronic music producer you ever listened to.
Then, you still got into a regular high school. You started living the life of alternating long and short weeks early on: six and a half days of classes during long weeks, six days during short weeks, morning runs and reading at 7 AM, and evening self-study ending at 10 PM.
You saved up some meal money, secretly bought a backup phone, and hid it in your locker. At night, lying under the covers, you secretly watched videos and realized you had become the introverted, sexually repressed, closeted guy with a prison buzz cut that others mocked—someone wasting their prime youth on endless exam prep in the "test-taking zone."
You can't talk back because your youth was indeed dedicated to test-taking. You didn't have a轰轰烈烈 (passionate) first love, and you didn't have time to shave before morning runs and reading.
Finally, you made it through. You got into a decent undergraduate program. After crazily playing "Delta Force," "Apex Legends," and "PUBG" at internet cafes for a whole holiday break, you convinced your parents to buy you a gaming laptop with an RTX 4060, using the excuse that "you might need to learn video editing and photo retouching in college." You also got your own Steam account, with tens of thousands of AAA and indie games becoming accessible with just a bit of money and determination...
Congratulations, you have now officially become the most despised group on the contemporary internet: "Laptop Male College Students."
What is a "Laptop Male College Student"?
"Laptop Male College Student" generally refers to male college students whose only gaming device is a laptop.
The specific origin of this term is unverifiable, but its emergence can be roughly pinned to around 2025. It is typically used by veteran multi-platform gamers to attack those with shallow gaming experience, poor understanding, and who start sharply critiquing Everythinggj without even playing the games. It is especially applicable on platforms like Xiaoheihe, which bind game accounts and allow instant inventory checks with three right-clicks to expose "cloud gamers."
Below are usage examples:
When a PlayStation 5 player sees the TGA 2024 Game of the Year, "Astro Bot," receiving a flood of 3.0-star negative reviews on Xiaoheihe, with countless cloud gamers who haven't even touched or watched the game coming in droves to leave negative reviews and insults, saying things like "Not as good as Black MYTH - Steam Edition" or "Just 4399 quality," one can reply, "Laptop Male College Students are making a fuss. They don't play the game, don't have the equipment, follow the trend in leaving negative reviews, and steal their talking points."
When the game you've been eagerly awaiting is released, but someone ruins the mood by sharply critiquing, "I feel the value for money isn't as good as Assassin's Creed Shadows; at least their main story lasts 30 hours," you can retort with, "Classic Laptop Male College Student using playtime to judge Everythinggj. Hasn't played a single linear game, but must have something to say."
When seeing classic clichés like "'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' only costs 14.9, why does XX game cost 468?" or "I feel XX game isn't as realistic as RDR2," you can summarize it with a single phrase: "Typical Laptop Male College Student thinking"...
Below are more usage examples. These examples do not represent the author's personal views; please use them critically.
At first glance, the connotation of this meme seems similar to the previously common term "Cloud Gamers," but the latter's impact and reach fall far short of the former. The reason is simple: "Laptop Male College Student" is an attack that is too precise, too clever, and too vivid.
In this structure, both "Laptop" and "Male College Student" are indispensable elements.
"Laptop" constitutes the objective conditional factor of this bad meme. It refers to the fact that Laptop Male College Students' gaming device is only a gaming laptop. This is because Laptop Male College Students lack financial means; most non-rich second-generation students studying full-time lack funds. A gaming laptop is one of the few gaming devices that newly graduated high school seniors, lacking income sources, can justify purchasing under the guise of "work and study needs." It is also the only device that can balance gaming and office work, requires no additional peripherals like monitors, and can be conveniently carried between the dorm, classroom, and home.
Therefore, what always sits on their desk is a black, brick-like, cost-effective gaming laptop that sounds like a helicopter taking off when running.
They don't have a PlayStation 5, nor a Switch, and certainly not an Xbox. Naturally, they couldn't have played the exclusive games on these platforms, leading to a 100% "cloud gamer" status when they start critiquing.
And "Male College Student" represents the subjective conscious factors of Laptop Male College Students. Their demand for games is urgent because they have just been liberated from six years of test-taking repression and now possess a device powerful enough to run almost all mainstream games on the market, reaching a historical peak in their craving for games.
And the experience of Laptop Male College Students is also shallow. This gaming laptop is usually the first proper gaming device they've encountered. Steam became fully popular in recent years while they were still studying and taking exams, leading to them having accumulated very little gaming experience.
Also due to their lack of experience, they view Everythinggj they see for the first time through a beautiful filter. At this time,恰逢 (coinciding with) sales on classic older AAA titles like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" and "Red Dead Redemption 2," or the sudden emergence of "Black MYTH - Steam Edition: Wukong," these games naturally became the white moonlight in their hearts, turning into the benchmark they use when comparing other games.
Add to these core elements a bit of excessive desire to express oneself, a strong sense of self-importance, and a few pretentious remarks intended to distinguish oneself from roommates who play gacha games or battle royales, but which backfire spectacularly, and the typical image of a "Laptop Male College Student" leaps off the page.
This image is so vivid and visual. From Tieba, Zhihu, and Xiaoheihe, to Nintendo fans, PlayStation fans, and PC master race hubs, the "Laptop Male College Student" meme is known and used by everyone. Later, this meme even crossed over from the gaming sphere into political discourse and even gender opposition fields. No money, no experience, no cognition, loves sharp critiques, and happens to be the most sexually repressed demographic of college students—this user profile suddenly resonated strongly with the "3D People" created by Brother Feng.
Thus, many outrageous comments in these fields were "logically" pinned onto the heads of Laptop Male College Students by certain groups.
Image source: Bilibili @Mimi Youtiao
Suddenly, "Laptop Male College Student" became the most useful label on the entire internet, applied wherever needed. Short dramas mocking Laptop Male College Students, titled "Day X of Being a Laptop Male College Student," reached 28 episodes... If this continues, this year's @DaiDaiGeneral's "What Bad Things Did Sun Xiaochuan Do?" will soon turn into "What Bad Things Did Laptop Male College Students Do?"
Even many people started reflecting—Oh no, I seem to really be the "Laptop Male College Student" they described. Should I reflect on myself? What should I do to change?
So, are "Laptop Male College Students" really as outrageous as online public opinion suggests?
Not so.
Although we said earlier that "Laptop Male College Student" is a precise, clever, and vivid meme, this "precision" stems precisely from its excessive "breadth." We feel it is precise, even feeling personally targeted by this meme, because the vast majority of us gamers have, to some extent, gone through the "Laptop Male College Student" phase.
During our college years, the ownership rate of GTX 1060 gaming laptops in our dorm was an astonishing 83.3%. Except for the one guy who eventually secured a postgraduate recommendation through sheer grinding, everyone had one. And they were almost all bulky, black, and loud, brand-new Hasee, Shinelon, or Mechrevo gaming laptops that sounded like they were taking off when gaming.
Classic big black brick adapter, weighing over two jin (1 kg), plus the unit itself totals ten jin (5 kg).
Because the dorm room is small, there's no space for a larger PC tower and monitor. The dorm's power supply is also poor; slightly higher power consumption trips the breaker. A gaming laptop can save progress using its battery, but a desktop would just shut down. Also, everyone is poor. Rich kids can indeed have a MacBook for study and work and a console for leisure, but most of us are just kids from ordinary families who love games. We could only convince our families to pay for one device, so that device naturally had to cover all needs from study to play.
For the same reason, the range of games we purchase is limited to those that are "trendy, affordable, and high value-for-money." Games with significant discounts and rich content, such as "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" and "Red Dead Redemption 2," naturally become easier choices for "young people's first AAA game"...
The so-called "Laptop Male College Students" are most of us. Those who posted outrageous comments and got called out are naturally part of the broader "Laptop Male College Student" crowd.
But using "Laptop Male College Student" to attack them is unreasonable.
It's simple logic: in any large group, there will naturally be a few idiots. However, the common traits of these few idiots do not prove that everyone sharing those traits is an idiot. To use an inappropriate analogy, if some Chinese tourists behave uncivilizedly while traveling abroad, you can condemn those specific individuals, but if you say "uncivilized tourists are very Chinese," don't blame people for turning against you.
Similarly, the "Laptop Male College Student" in the bad meme cannot represent all laptop-owning male college students. While they may generally lack experience, they are not all cloud gamers, contrarians, or idiots who like to show off their superiority over console players.
Everyone understands this simple logic, so why do the people crusading against "Laptop Male College Students" remain endless?
To answer this question, we might need to look back a couple of steps.
Why do some people, knowing full well that one or two knockoff Android phones cannot represent the entire operating system ecosystem, let alone the people who use them, still label most users of those phones as "lower class"?
The answer is obvious—
The subtext of looking down on Android phones is "I'm different; I'm a superior person using high-end Apple devices." Similarly, the subtext of calling others "Laptop Male College Students" is "I am much higher than Laptop Male College Students." Their essence is to assign inferior and ugly stereotypes to a group based on individual cases, and then detach oneself from them to show one's own uniqueness.
Looking at the vast majority of sweeping generalizations today, their underlying logic remains unchanged.
Most people study hard for twelve years, yet some label them as "test-taking worms" to show that they themselves are highly educated talents with comprehensive moral, intellectual, and physical training. Most people work, find jobs, and start families after graduation, yet some label them as "laborers" and the "base population" to show that they are unique, independent thinkers, the "non-base generation."
Because the underlying logic remains unchanged, the mockery of "Laptop Male College Students" spreads into political discourse; because the underlying logic remains unchanged, ordinary people just trying to live and breathe find unlimited labels slapped onto their heads at any time...
Perhaps there aren't so many labels or subdivided groups in the world. There are only two types of people: idiots and normal people. Normal people dislike idiots, but picking a few stereotypical labels from idiots and pointing at a group shouting, "Look, idiots!" doesn't make you look normal, nor does it make you stand out from the crowd.
That's also an idiot.