What I’m saying is that it is not satire — satire has a very specific definition, and the article doesn’t meet that definition. To claim it is satire and to hide behind satire as a shield is duplicitous.

Obviously there were people out there who saw the humor and laughed hence the article achieved its purpose. Guess the fact that there is living proof contradictory to your words is the reason I find no credibility besides a ego trip behind this article.

I guess it’s sad for all the people who really like playing CoD or whatever, but I played Gears of War 2 online for a total of four sittings in my life. Two of those sittings ended with someone sending me a message threatening to rape me to death. (Different people, oddly)

I have played fighting games (Street Fighter, Blazblue, Marvel vs Capcom 3) online for a little over 2 years, and had over 100 very positive interactions, and only ever been called a fag once.

Maybe this is easy for me to say, because I don’t go for shooters as much, but if you can’t take punk-ass-13-year-old-kid-calling-you-a-pussy-faggot-cause-you-don’t-spend-all-your-time-playing-the-game, then get out of the kitchen. (Yeah, maybe I should have just said, “fire”, but this way had more dramatic impact)

Obviously the long term solution is to stop raising hideous little snots who learn curse words faster than the discretion to not spew them at everyone different from them, but in the immediate sense, if that gets under your skin, why would you subject yourself to it? Talking about this kid like he deserved to get strangled seems like blaming the mountain lion for attacking the hiker. Yes, it’s awful that the kid was such an ass, but how could you possibly play a shooter online without expecting that someone is going to call you a faggot for something?

And I strongly agree, Darius. The “satire” label is obviously either a complete lack of understanding of the definition, or a backpedal. My vote is on the latter. I get the weird primal satisfaction of sticking it to a kid who has been incredibly obnoxious, but if you actually wanted to write an article acknowledging that, you don’t talk about the 46 year old man like he’s a goddamn crime fighter.

Joystiq lacked any real message like many of the writers and editors who exploit such emotionally-charged news stories in tenuously-linked articles seeking mainly page views and not for any real discussion- whether expressed through humour or otherwise.

Here’s how Stuart Campbell responded when I challenged his  sensationally titled “How 9/11 killed videogame journalism” published on the tenth anniversary of the tragedy: “I’m way too old and weary to care about some feeble p*ssy scared of a couple of words. They’re just f*cking *words*. Grow up.”

Words have meaning, when used recklessly or in jest or in moments of brilliance, and if you don’t take credit for them what kind of writer are you?

Speaking in a “non-literal” fashion is sarcasm. It’s not automatically satire: satire critiques.

A good chunk of satire actually proposes solutions to the problem being addressed, presented via the rhetorical technique of apophasis — where you refer to something by explicitly mentioning you won’t talk about it, or that you disagree with it. For example, the original article could say something like, “Some would say that Mark Bradford is a reprehensible human being [followed by a litany of perfectly reasonable arguments as to why he's an idiot and the kid is a victim of a psychopath]“. That would be one way the article could distinguish itself as satire rather than mere sarcasm.