First of all, the premise of the Mystery Date board game is awesome. Someone knocks on your door; you don’t know who it is, and you go on a date with them. How did they know where you live? It doesn’t matter—you’re just relieved that you did not draw the nerd card. As any semi-adolescent girl will tell you, drawing the nerd card is a catastrophic event. It is positively newsworthy, in fact. Proof: this Gawker piece series of screenshots about passive-aggressive text messages from a lawyer who showed up to the first date wearing a fedora. The fedora is key.*
It establishes that the man whose text messages have now been viewed 77,000 times is an unsympathetic character, and we do not need to consider the implications of using the most sophisticated communications medium in human history to be catty about a bad date. It’s the same rhetorical device we see in this first date story and this one.