Fan Boys – Saga Continues

Fan (fanboy) is an abbreviation from fanatic. A word which carries a burden of negative connotations and rightly so. Indeed, throughout history we’ve encountered many form of fanaticism. A fanatic can act uncritically with great zeal or passion in many different areas. Religious (God wills it, thus we shall purge heathens by holy flame), nationalistic (Germany before WW2), racial (Ku Klux Klan). In our modern society we developed a new form of fanaticism: sports (which can be stretched to e-sports as well) and products, I’ll take a closer look at the latter form.

Of course there are many kinds of products, however we won’t be discussing disputes between Coca-Cola and Pepsi (because everyone knows Pepsi is much better). Do you see what I did there?

Instead we’ll focus on something we actually care about, games.

In general fanboys claim they love one game or a particular genre of games and hate everything else. Is it because they spent 60$ and they’re trying to persuade themselves and the whole wide world that they didn’t waste their money on that purchase? Or perhaps it’s just “my way or the highway” thinking? Indeed, fanboys don’t really grasp the fact their personal tastes don’t affect what anyone else happens to like. However, it’s not for me to judge the narrow minded opinions of fanboys.

Despite their motives, fanboys will plague comment sections, chat rooms and forums just to prove some genre or game is better than another in every possible way. I’ll use StarCraft and League of Legends as a example of a quarrel between two groups of fanboys.

Both games are very well known on the e-sport scene and are two of the most popular games when it comes to competitive play. However, despite the fact StarCraft and LoL can coexist, some groups of people seem to think (although I’m not sure if they are capable of actual thought process) otherwise.

The main argument against LoL is that it doesn’t take as much skill as StarCraft, but does it really take less PERSONAL skill than StarCraft? Certainly does. Does it take less skill in general than StarCraft? Probably yes, however communication and teamwork are very important skills and the main factors deciding whether a game is won or lost.

So it may seem, without a doubt, less skilful for you. You may say: “I don’t enjoy it because it is not at skilful as SC2“. But do you really hate the game? It’s only a game after all and hate and love are opposites, but they are the strongest emotions a human can feel. So next time when you think: I love this game, consider if it’s really love. How would you describe the feelings for your family/partner/friends then? I know sometimes people tend to colloquially state: “oh, I love it”, however they don’t really mean it. The real meaning of this colloquial expression would be more like: “I really enjoy it, and I think it is great”.

It goes the same way about hatred, it’s just the opposite. Of course you don’t even have to use the word “hate” to drop a shitbomb on some game, for example (quotes from Hydramist comments): “There is nothing worse in the world than LoL” or “Hydramist covering LoL? Your heading the wrong way, this is the way of pathetic people”.

If you can’t be more open minded about the topics we write about, you may as well stop visiting this website. You’ll be better off without us, and we will be better off without you.

For example I don’t like sports and racing games. The main reason being that I’d rather play football in real life instead of doing it on a computer. However, I’m far from saying I hate sports games or I hate FIFA and everything connected with it. If Hydramist started to cover FIFA (it is an WCG title after all) I could:

a) Skip the article because the topic doesn’t interest me at all.

b)  Read the article because I like blogger or the general Hydramist way of doing things. However, I wouldn’t leave comments like: “omg, fifa sux, fire the writer, he is shit, stop covering this pathetic game” or “Omg, fifa again, I quit hydramist foreva”. Instead I would just remain silent or say something like “While I don’t enjoy fifa as a game, it was good read, you made interesting points/I enjoyed your coverage of the recent tournament”

Both A and B are good options for doing things. However if you were to write “shit article, I’ll never visit your page again” our reaction would be:

a) Bye

b) We don’t care because we have hundreds of thousands readers and one bigot leaving won’t make a difference

c)  We would rather enjoy a smaller but smarter and more open minded community

Looks like I went a little bit off-topic here :) FML

To the point then,

It is your and ONLY YOUR decision to like a title or not. If you are talking about it publicly try to remain civil and objective. Accept that you are not the only person in the world and other people may think differently and may like different music, films and games than you. Try to find things you have in common instead of mindlessly bashing other people. And with this sentence I’m done with tilting at windmills, erm… fanboys.