Internet Comments
I was reading David Wong’s “The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey” yesterday. A agreed with some of the points, disagreed with others, and generally liked the article. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading the comments, and was stupified by the fanboyism and dickish behavior that abounds. Here’s an example:
Jonathane
It’s pretty clear from these ideas what kind of gamer you are. Maybe you should change the name of the thread to ‘7 commandments dumb action games for console fans should obey’. I can’t take anyone who mocks oblivion or half life seriously.
While he has the right to his opinion, completely disregarding someone’s arguments because that person (and not necessarily the given argument) challenges your beliefs is the sort of thing that gets us into great (meaning large, not possesing good qualities [quite the opposite]) debates about politics, religion, science, video-game consoles, and any intersections of the aforesaid subjects. When people pull out their ignorant-jackass comments, other people follow:
Oregano Angercock
I think it’s pretty clear what kind of gamer jonathane is. An incredibly fat gamer.
Another ad-hom attack, but worse in that it is pure insult and has nothing to do with anything Jonathane said. This poster was just being a huge dick. But that’s how things go, it’s human nature. I offend your sensabilities, so you put up your defenses, I put up mine, and nothing gets resolved, and we get the big mess that society’s in right now. This is ones of the downsides to having an open exchange of ideas: everyone gets to contribute, fucking retarded or not. The other is that everybody gets to choose what they want to believe out of the swirling mass of information, fucking retarded or not. You could have put in some of the one hundred million (100,000,000) hours of human thought that went into Wikipedia, or you could spend a couple of minutes (heh) thinking up and typing the above response.
Everybody knows that people on the internet are more than willing to let out their inner fucktard (see the comment by John Watts), yet few realize that that is just an extension of what people do naturally, that it’s putting the brakes on the advancement of human thought and limiting the progress people can make as a community just as surely as it makes us cringe in disgust when we read it on the internet.
[Although we do now know that this type of verbal defensiveness is a manifestation of “bad” high self-esteem.]