Opinion: PC fanboys…

30 July 2009

I’m not talking about people who simply prefer one platform over another, for whatever reason. No, I’m talking about that particular brand of twit who has decided that his chosen platform is the only platform worth playing on, and that everything else obviously totally sucks.

So when I was invited by my interlocutor to put a part of myself on a part of himself in an activity I can only describe, given his apparent level of maturity, as paedophilia, I abandoned the discussion. Journalists like me have eminently better recourse to comment than some quickly forgotten post on a forum. Here it is.

“I hate consoles,” declares Hypothetical PC Fanboy Subject A, with all the incontrovertible  authority of a brat who doesn’t get enough pocket money to buy one anyway. Look for any discussion of gaming on console anywhere, and Hypothetical PC Fanboy Subject A (usually in number) will bully in and offer this unsolicited observation with all the drab inevitability of geriatric incontinence.

This is invariably followed up with a cut and pasted litany of console evils, invariably including some smug invective about how rubbish controllers are for shooters because all those years camping cheap frags with scripts and mods and wallhacks in Counter-Strike has made him forget about stuff like opposable thumbs and skill.

When challenged, Hypothetical PC Fanboy Subject A is always quick to pull the big red I’M ENTITLED TO MY OPINION (spelling varies) card, because apparently this automatically and instantaneously exonerates anyone of otherwise outrageous stupidity.

On the contrary, however, I’d like to suggest that nobody is entitled to opinions that demonstrate nothing so much as a complete lack of intelligent consideration. You know, the stuff that real opinions are traditionally made of. Saying you hate consoles isn’t an opinion, it’s an damning indictment of your own unchecked dumb.

It’s like saying you hate motorbikes just because you drive a car, and probably because you’ve never actually been on a motorbike anyway. Meanwhile, the fact that motorbikes and cars  and game platforms are really simply a means to an end remains completely – and inscrutably – irrelevant. This just in, genius – you’re playing games, not platforms.

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