Possibly now, more than ever before (Ed. Sigh…):

As usual, the opinions expressed in this column are the author’s alone, and do not reflect those of MyGaming

I’ve been a gaming writer for around four years or so now, and I’ve managed to offend quite a lot of people in that time. It’s not that I’m trying, mind you, but there’s simply no accounting for Mr and Ms Public’s rarified sensibilities and/or sense of humour failures. I got hate mail once for suggesting that blogs are a big load of self-important rubbish, the outraged blogger reader obviously having missed the apparently way too subtle irony of the statement.

The thing is, gamers who complain make up a percentage of every gaming site’s readership, but we do seem to have them in disproportionate numbers locally. Specifically, we have an unusually dense* concentration of gamers complaining about “objectionable content” in articles, where “objectionable content” equals anything that’s about sex or uses any of a range of words condemned during the Victorian era because they were also about sex. Oh, yeah, and if I use too many syllables in a sentence, where “too many” is definitively decided by the sort of person who writes “your” instead of “you’re”.

This (logically, apparently) leads to sanctimonious accusations that writers producing this sort of “objectionable content” have no journalistic integrity, are morally bankrupt, and (logically, apparently) consider themselves “gods”. The thinking here is that the writer’s opinions aren’t in line with the reader’s opinions, so the writer’s opinions are wrong.

I don’t know about the other MyGaming writers, but I can’t pretend to care anymore when some guy reads an entire article about something, and complains about a single word in it. Or stops reading altogether at that word and complains about it. Or suggests we’re unscrupulous, depraved, shamelessly profiteering seducers of the wide-eyed innocent for publishing “sensationalist” articles about Fable III-branded condoms. What, did you just get here from an international symposium on the corruption of youth, or are you just pretending you know everything about ethics because you haven’t filled your complaints quota for the day? Have you really got nothing better to do than be all offended over something that wasn’t intended to offend you?

This just isn’t something you see on other gaming sites like, say, Destructoid – who, coincidentally enough, have just invited readers to submit articles about… sex in games. The piece also drops (scandal!) an f-bomb. Significantly, there are no complaints about any of this in the comments. Why aren’t our readers more like those readers?

One of the reasons I write articles is to promote discussion, but comments that presume to dictate some insidious, reptilian agenda end that discussion before it gets started. Don’t be the conversation killer. Besides, our cheap tabloid sensationalism is just about printing cash, so smile – we can pay for the stitches.

*It might be a pun.