I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across the below tweet from video game developer, Bungie.
As a brief recap, two people were murdered, and ten were injured at a shooting in Jacksonville. The shooting took place at the GLHF Game Bar on Sunday, while the bar was hosting a video game tournament, the Madden Classic.
So out of respect for its fellow gamers, Bungie decides to hold a day of silence. Makes sense right?
Not according to some of the angry trolls in the comments. When I use the word troll, I don’t use it to denote people who say stupid or hurtful things just to get a rise out of people. That definition implies that these people don’t genuinely believe in the words they type. When I say “troll,” I am referring to the spoiled and ignorant people who infest the online community, and ultimately ruin it.
Apparently, a launch trailer for Forsaken was supposed to debut during this period of silence. So, these gamers, only care about that and were quick to criticize Bungie’s move.
The level of selfishness here borders on sociopathy and I don’t know why it surprises me. I mean, this is the same community that was involved in Gamergate. Spending a few hours on Xbox Live makes it clear how insensitive/racist/sexist gamers can be.
The tweets that really stuck with me are ones like this:
So Wolfchadren is actually trying to sound virtuous here. He wants us to realize there are people dying all over the world, and thinks we shouldn’t just care about highly publicized ones like Jacksonville. Other tweets follow the same logic, bringing up areas like Gaza. A part of me can appreciate what they are trying to say, but it rings hollow here. Bringing up other people’s death comes across as an disingenuous copout to defend their own selfishness e.g. “I want my trailer and I don’t care about Bungie’s act of respect for my fellow dead gamers.”
I doubt that people like Wolfchadren care about people dying in Gaza or anywhere else in the world. Read the third sentence in his tweet again: “It is good to remember but for those who have nothing to do with it things should just stay normal as planned.” Wolfchadren doesn’t care about change. He cares about things staying the same. The trailer was supposed to be released today, and now a pesky show of respect for dead people is getting in the way. I am using Wolfchadren as a case study but he is not the only person with this mentality. Read through the thread for yourself.
Maybe I can’t just blame this on gamer culture. I am sure there are other examples of this callousness all over the internet, but this is the first such example I have witnessed. People can find anything to argue about, but I never thought a day of (social media) silence would be something that people can disagree on.
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