As much as I enjoy Bob's work I feel his hatred of jocks and bro culture is getting out of hand.
MovieBob said:
An illustration of how VGAs are ruining our image.
The VGAs don't ruin our image.
We ruin our image.
The Escapist is often very idealistic about gaming and gamers, a stance personified by shows like
The Big Picture and the former ur-example,
Extra Credits. It's a nice stance to take, but it is, deep down and at its worst, as narrow minded as the worst caricature of the online FPS community.
Because it's based on a lie. It's based on the lie that popular franchises from big soulless publishers crush struggling but deserving indies underfoot while drawing in a horde of jocks who ruin our gaming utopia with their crude, uncivilised ways. When I watch Bob sometimes I hear this subtext of "I liked it better when the dudes that bullied me at school didn't like what I like."
Why is it a lie? Because they're not the jocks. They're
us.
Nerds/geeks/gamers/whatever used to be a minority, who would have to go out of their way to meet others who shared their interests and would treasure those rare meetings of minds. Then the Internet happened and suddenly we were knee-deep in 'our kind' and we didn't
have to be friends with everyone anymore, so we split up into niches and started hating people who were in slightly different niches. You know, just like sports fans do. Just like the jocks do.
The Escapist is not representative of gaming culture. Fucking 4Chan is more representative of that, or would be if there was such a thing.
We became what we hated, and now we get the awards shows we deserve. A shallow, superficial parade of emptiness, hype, stupidity and memes* - just like the rest of the internet, and just like most games.
[sub]*teabagging is no better or worse than spamming FUS RO DAH or arrow jokes in forums, but I'm betting if they'd swapped the FPS references for Skyrim references they'd have got a different write up.[/sub]