There’s a simple answer to Brian Crecente’s question, but first let’s address the straw man argument at its heart. The definition of gaming that he seems to think everyone who plays video games is so hung up on may be narrow, but it’s not arbitrary. It’s very easy to tell what is a video game and what isn’t. That some of your readers can tell the difference between a video game and underage Japanese girls should not surprise you. You don’t have to be particularly intelligent to make that distinction.
The reason people complain about Kotaku’s tourettes-like need to talk about things that aren’t video games is also easy to understand. The internet is a big place. Many of your readers have jobs, or are full-time students. Some of us have families. We read books, listen to music, go for walks, play with our dogs. If we allot the time to read a video game website, we’d rather not have to scroll through pages of posts about cakes, action figures, Mike Fahey’s fantasies of being the next Chris Mooney, and Brian Ashcraft’s gross fixation Japanese junior high school girls in order to find something about video games. There are other sites that will give us what we come to read quickly and concisely. Yours no longer does that.
Your arrogance hasn’t done your site any favors, though. Why bother reading if we know that contributing anything other than adulation for your writers is likely to result in a ban? There are lots of sites that won’t censor our comments or ban us for being critical. We’ll read them instead.
I know you’re asking a rhetorical question, that you really don’t care about the answer. But I’m being pedantic and answering it anyway. The reason some of us are so hung up on your crappy blog is that it wastes our time and perpetuates negative stereotypes about people who play video games. If your site is, as you say, “The Gamer’s Guide,” then any outsider who looks at it will quickly develop an idea of gamers as uneducated, basement dwelling pedophiles. That really bothers a few of us, so we talk about it, and try to undo some of the damage your site is doing to our reputation.
You’re the editor of a site that refers to itself as “The Gamer’s Guide”, Brian. What the fuck do you expect to happen when you post irrelevant aardvark bile?
Not only that but Kotaku undermines the other Gawker blogs like Io9 whenever they post a review about Iron Man 2 or Inception. It defeats the purpose of having specialty blogs dedicated to one topic.
