Jimmy Kimmel featured a comedy sketch on his show the other day poking fun at YouTube gamers, and specifically the people who watch them. The reasonable reaction to this if you’re the kind of person who enjoys doing such a thing would be to watch it and then carry on with your life, safe in the knowledge that you enjoy doing it and, yeah, some people may find it a little weird, but that it does not in any way diminish the level of joy you get out of doing it, so who the fuck cares?
However, there were many, many people who decided to give the late night talk show host a piece of their mind by way of thousands upon thousands of dislikes (the video currently sits at a like/dislike ratio of over 5,000/over 60,000) and a comments section that largely consists of insults and threats to Kimmel, his wife and his child.
Watch the video in which Kimmel details the negative reaction below:
And if you were wondering whether or not the original video warranted such a visceral reaction (of course it didn’t), then you can find out for yourself below:
And this is exactly why the so-called “gaming community” seems so hostile and impenetrable to anybody standing on the outside looking in. The amount of hateful vitriol that regularly circulates the medium would be enough to make anybody not want to be a part of it, and the pack mentality adopted and perpetuated by many who seek to defend their hobby from any and all criticism inevitably leads to this kind of insanity, where a late night chat show host can devote an entire segment of his show to hateful comments and death threats he received as a result of poking fun at people watching Let’s Plays on YouTube.
I’m not sure if the “gaming community” of which these people speak actually exists. There are people who enjoy playing games just as there are people who enjoy watching movies or reading books, and neither of those hobbies requires anyone to buzz themselves into the hivemind and ruthlessly stand up for any and all perceived injustice their hobby faces, no matter how innocuous these “threats” may be.
It seems that the gaming community is instead a catch-all phrase used by the humorless, joyless and easily offended, the same who will burst into comments sections of a video game review they disagree with and, in a similar fashion, tell the reviewer that they are an embarrassment to the community they’re involuntarily a part of, or who will find an article online that they disagree with and so immediately suggest that the author is not a “real gamer.”
In summary, it’s highly embarrassing and those who are involved should seriously evaluate their priorities, or at the very least try to get their head around the notion that some people are not going to enjoy the same things that they do.
