Gamers are a passionate lot. They pour thousands upon thousands of hours into their favorite games, and shell out billions of dollars a year to suckle at the electronic teat. But why are so many gamers disillusioned, bitter, and frustrated? Is it that the industry really is just a steaming turd of rehashed ideas, blatant rip-offs, and bad PR? If so, why do we keep spending our time and money on it? The only answer is that gamers simply love to hate. Welcome to Hate Week, where we'll deconstruct the mentality of gaming's culture of hate.
By nature gamers are web savvy, and the internets were obviously designed to be the world's greatest repository of hateful bickering. Consider the following ethnographic artifact. Here we see a red-plumed Sony-hater in his natural environment, on YouTube. Warning: Contains naughty language, possibly not safe for work.
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The internet is a communication tool which has led to the democratization of media. The result is that every day blogs, forums and community sites overflow with the detritus of gaming's complaint culture. While we would never suggest that haters comprise the majority of gamers, their verbal vomit is abundant enough to drown out everything else. The competitive nature of gaming lends itself to the confrontational attitudes that fuel arguments over which game is teh awesome and which console is teh suck. While other hobbyist websites and forums are devoted to people helping each other out and sharing expertise, gamers are focused on taking each other down a notch or two. It's the logical extension of the Team Deathmatch mentality projected into the community space.
The gaming phenomenon is so huge that it's attracted all types of people from all walks of life. So out of every million gamers, at least a few thousand are bound to be assholes.Online games are swarming with team killers, griefers, scammers, racists, perverts and homophobes.And thanks to the magic of network technology, you have to listen to them all at once.
