Now that the dust has settled with this "controversy" I want to make this topic. Everyone should know that this reaction was inappropriate, but I'm not a big fan of the numbers of comments+dislikes because it makes it really hard to defend statements justifying the gaming community starting with "most gamers" since this is no minority perpetuating this issue. This also plays into a larger issue of people policing comedians on what jokes they may or may not say, with how much people would rather have smoke blown up their ass than hear something they don't like and engage civilly. I enjoy Let's Plays, and don't even disagree that they're a "double waste of time," but I enjoy myself anyway because I like the commentary and watching the game along with it. I honestly don't know how this all started and I do suspect there's organizing going on because I have never seen so many nerds get together to form this kind of response to something.
Gaming should be fun, and interesting. Gamers should reflect that by being civil, and not lumping themselves in as a collective with the people who do behave properly. Every single time it seems that a group is attacked, you'll probably how much money that group (not them necessarily) raised for X charity, and say it's a great thing whilst calling you ignorant followed by one or more expletives.
This is response to Kimmel is how a lot of people see gamers, so the main question for this thread is if there is any recovering from this for the gaming community?
I did not get to see the original clip, and I wasn't really a fan of Kimmel anyway. But from what I've heard of the clip, I probably would have found it kind of funny.
I do not agree on how he responded to the backlash. Though I did like the "shut down" comeback.
I'll admit, his opinion about the whole gaming community was a bit rude, but the gamers did over-react, so...there's fault on both ends here. I never heard of the guy, so I didn't really care about it.
Aside from a section of a Game Theory episode where Matt talked about him, I've never even heard of this Jimmy Kimmel guy. He looks like a discount Jimmy Fallon with a beard. Anyways, what he's doing in those videos? Baiting to get a reaction, and by extension, views.
This is just one incident of many where someone will write an article or make a video or something, about something that's popular, and they basically bash it to hell and back. This is not done because they actually give a shit about the popular thing. They do it for views. They know that if they insult something popular, fans will rush to their video to defend the thing they like, giving the creator views in the process. Easy money if your channel is monetized.
It is a disgusting, cheap tactic, and is one of the biggest problems I have with the concept of views and the culture that spawned from them.
This is kind of parroting what MattPat said in his video, but I believe it's something worth repeating.
Chip Potato wrote:Aside from a section of a Game Theory episode where Matt talked about him, I've never even heard of this Jimmy Kimmel guy. He looks like a discount Jimmy Fallon with a beard. Anyways, what he's doing in those videos? Baiting to get a reaction, and by extension, views.
This is just one incident of many where someone will write an article or make a video or something, about something that's popular, and they basically bash it to hell and back. This is not done because they actually give a shit about the popular thing. They do it for views. They know that if they insult something popular, fans will rush to their video to defend the thing they like, giving the creator views in the process. Easy money if your channel is monetized.
It is a disgusting, cheap tactic, and is one of the biggest problems I have with the concept of views and the culture that spawned from them.
This is kind of parroting what MattPat said in his video, but I believe it's something worth repeating.
AeroMatter wrote:This also plays into a larger issue of people policing comedians on what jokes they may or may not say, with how much people would rather have smoke blown up their ass than hear something they don't like and engage civilly.
That's a really great post you have there, but I would prefer it if you had an informed opinion, and stopped repeating garbage.
The reaction was unjustified. Kimmel made a joke and was attacked by masses of gamers, and now he is at fault for being attacked and then having the audacity to point it out? Doesn't make sense how he's in the wrong for telling a joke and then being attacked and threatened.
Honestly, I feel like this doesn't change much for the gaming community in itself. We've been kinda closed-off and looked down on from the other media like radio, TV or newspapers ever since gaming existed. Of course, we may not get as many new members, but people will always experience the magic of playing a great game for the first time, be it Super Mario World or MGSV. As such, I feel like this is only another one of those cases where mass media like TV is ignorant against gaming (be it on purpose or not), just like that ESPN e-Sports thing, except in this case, we got a comedian like Kimmel fueling the fire.
And we shouldn't forget: He's a comedian. He wants views. There's no bad publicity, so even though he's getting tons of dislikes, he also gets even more views, and he can call out the immature responses and thus ignore the valid ones (not like he'd acknowledge these in any case), and that means that the ones viewing him on TV see those people being immature as all that gaming is.
But we as a community should ask ourselves: Do we want people that watch Jimmy Kimmel and don't research on that further in the commufnity? Of course, I may be a bit of an elitist in that regard, but I bet most of those people that watched this wouldn't be interested in gaming outside of their snartphones either way.
I talked about how there's no bad publicity earlier. However, is what Kimmel did about gaming really "good" publicity? Most people already know that gaming is a thing that exists, and content like that don't educate them on that but only increase their ignorance. Is that really no bad publicity?
Spinda wrote:and he can call out the immature responses and thus ignore the valid ones (not like he'd acknowledge these in any case)
Again, he's not at fault because people went out of their way to attack him. They're the ones that gave him the views, and kept the ball rolling when they could have just not liked the joke and moved on and watched a Let's Play. This is bad publicity for anyone that calls themselves a "gamer," and confirms stereotypes about them such as being no-lives trolling on the internet which was clearly demonstrated here.
