Disclaimer, as usual, the opinions expressed in this column are the author’s alone, and are not reflective of the views held by MyGaming.
Dear Fanboys,
Hi! How’re you? How’s Gran Turismo 5 / Halo: Reach / StarCraft II? Oh, what’s that? You’re so busy Googling reviews and slagging off scores under 110% that your copy’s still in the wrapper? That’s a shame – they’re supposed to be quite good.
So, I went to school with this guy, Craig. Well, the guy at my school was Craig, but every school has a Craig, even if his name isn’t actually Craig. Anyway, Craig was that guy – wait, you’ll recognise him now – who always talked up the biggest, wobbliest, most thoroughly fetid heap of sh**. At every opportunity, and about everything. Whatever you’d done, he’d done something better; whatever you had, he had something better. Anything Craig ever said to anybody with a modicum of intelligence was instantly discarded as irrelevant rubbish, because that’s exactly what it was.
Needless to say, perhaps, but Craig didn’t have any friends. Craig was an insufferable egotist, a pathological liar, and a terminally irredeemable omega male who was constantly compelled to make up for his obvious and enormous inadequacies by carrying loads of cash around in his pockets and showing the other kids during lunch. Basically, a total ballbag. Basically, a platform fanboy*.
Just so we’re clear on this, when I say “fanboy”, I mean “fanboy”. And when I say “fanboy”, I mean “moron”. I’m most certainly not talking about PC or console owners in general – or even people who just really, really, really love their favourite platform for whatever reason – I’m talking about those egotistical, lying, desperately inadequate omega males who turn up any time any website publishes the word “PS3”, “Xbox”, or “PC” in a context that doesn’t also prominently feature unconditional adulation and solemn piety, and heave their useless, fatuous, completely irrelevant “opinions” around like beached whales.
Fanboys are inevitable. It’s a fundamental law of the universe that anything that works as a penis substitute for the tragically under-endowed has its share of fanboys. I’m sure big rocks enjoyed a similar sort of celebrity back in the Pliocene. The penis substitutes might’ve changed over centuries of evolution, but the knuckle-dragging, chest-thumping, grossly over-compensating troglodyte principle hasn’t: MY COSMICALLY INCONSEQUENTIAL THING IS BETTER THAN YOURS**.
If by some happy chance I find myself in control of the universe some day, my first order of official business would surely be the immediate manufacture and dispatch of the USS Jeopardise***, the first colonial shuttle to the nearest black hole – and it would be stuffed with PS3, Xbox, and PC fanboys. Hey, I could probably use that as a campaign slogan – conjugated with that redoubtable winner, “FOR THE CHILDREN”.
I’ve been a gaming journalist for almost five years now, and a My Gaming writer for around 18 months or so. I’ve published hundreds of articles. And just about every single day, an otherwise entirely innocent news item or feature is brutally assaulted by pointless comments about X being better than Y. Like it matters or something.
I’m quite convinced that fanboys post this crap because they simply have absolutely nothing valuable or insightful to add to any discussion, ever. I mean, we are talking about people whose lives appear to revolve exclusively around their chosen platform’s imaginary universal supremacy. I guess when you’ve dedicated your immortal soul to the daily planetary broadcast of free marketing for a company or manufacturer that doesn’t know you exist, there’s not much space left for anything else.
And it’s not just on My Gaming, mind you. I read gaming news sites throughout the day, and I see it all over the place. Wherever gaming news is published, you can expect, with all the drab inevitability of in extremis incontinence, an hourly inundation of fanboys and its accompanying reams of vapid, tedious, mutually indistinguishable commentary that serves absolutely no purpose other than to obfuscate and overwhelm any meaningful discussion in between, and waste everybody else’s bandwidth.
It’s like fanboys have signed a global pledge of allegiance to consummate ****ing stupidity. You know, because… they all happen to own the same lump of plastic and silicon and solder, and mom won’t buy them any of the others.
To hell with my colonial shuttle – I’ll save the cash and push one of them off a cliff instead. The others will doubtless follow his lead, because the evidence would show – in abundance! – that they don’t think for themselves. Or comprehend the immediate danger of anything more serious than a Halo: Reach review aggregate that’s higher than Gran Turismo 5’s.
Thanks for reading,
Tarryn
* Even though the PS3 and Xbox hadn’t yet been invented in 1995. But if you’d asked him, Craig would’ve had them both in 1995 anyway. BECAUSE HIS DAD BOUGHT THEM FOR HIM ON A BUSINESS TRIP TO THE FUTURE.
** Or “RRAAAAAAGHHH” in the vernacular.
*** Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, on its way to boldly go where nobody else will ever go, ever.
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