Let's Play
A few weeks ago a horrible war broke out, a flame war that is. At the end of August, a Mr. Jimmy Kimmel made a joke (as is his job description) about YouTube Gaming, and received copious amounts of backlash from what he considered the gaming community (more likely just the gaming community’s resident trolls). He received death threats, insults, and plain nonsense after making a video simply designed for comedic effect. Lost among the conflict, however, were the individuals that may have had a laugh, but merely desired to correct any misconceptions Jimmy had about their passion and hobby. Now that the war is over and peace was made with the help of Markiplier and Miss Mae, I would like to explain one of the misconceptions that led to this ridiculous digital dispute.
As mentioned above, I doubt that the insults and death threats came from one of the normal subscribers of a Let’s Player channel. The messages have all the signs of trolls. For the less internet savvy, a troll is an individual whose sole purpose on the Internet is to enrage, annoy, and insult everyone they can. They can usually be identified by their horrible spelling, grammar and vocabulary and their ridiculous and absurd comments. Go to any gamer’s channel on YouTube and you will find a plethora of these attacking the YouTuber. I cannot prove this idea quantitatively, but if you've been on YouTube long enough, you start to know a troll when you see him.
Obviously, though, by reading even rather polite comments, one can tell that a lot of people feel passionately about Let's Players and their channels. Mark tried to explain some of the reason for this, but I feel he missed the mark (No pun intended). People don't watch people play video games for the game. It's nice to have an available walk-through and experience a game without buying it, but the real reason people watch them is the Let's Player himself. It's the Let's Player and his larger than life personality that people want to watch. It's the funny commentary, snide remarks and bits of encouragement that he offers. It's being part of something greater as the community raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity in a live stream. It's having a reminder of what it's like to laugh when it seems your life is crashing down around you. It's not about the games. It's about the people.
Photo from Round on Wikicommons. Provided by Tutelary. Screenshot of 2 Years of Markiplier posted by Mark Edward Fischback.
