Cool to Hate
With the announcement of Diablo III, the various comment pages posting stories were filled with Angry Internet Men proclaiming that it was too similar to World of Warcraft. Reading their posts, something struck me. Why are popular games (both in sales and reviews) seeing more and more bile and vitriol directed at them? We’ve seen it with The Sims (I’ll admit, I’m prone to this), Oblivion, Halo, BioShock ( which saw Kieron Gillen writing a rather long anti-anti-BioShock essay) and now World of Warcraft. One comment I saw (on Kotaku, I believe) was:
WoW is the cancer killing PC gaming.
I’m sorry, what? WoW is many things (not all of them good), but it is certainly not killing PC gaming. Nothing is killing PC gaming (which is an argument for another time).
Another comment I once saw (actually directed at me), on RPS (and I must admit, it rather offended me):
Martin Coxall says:
Real gamers /still/ play WoW? How cute.
September 10th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
It is certainly an interesting phenomenon, like some kind of inverse-fanboyism (something Chris touched on recently), mixed with a healthy bit of elitism and the ever reliable John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Though I do wonder if there is an element of peer pressure in there. Has it truly become cool to hate?
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