With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.
PewDiePie uses the N-word during a live stream
Roughly a week ago during a live stream of PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS PewDiePie used the N word towards another player that killed his teammate. Here is a link to an original video of the stream. A couple of days after this came out he issued an apology that you can watch for yourself.
Wiggin’s Thoughts: So this is quite a big topic to me because it encompasses so many different facets of the gaming industry and really gaming culture. While it’s good that PewDiePie took the time to apologize for what he said, it speaks volumes to the state of online gaming that it happened at all. Ever since I started online gaming in the early 2000’s it has always been standard behavior online mulitplayer games to shit talk other players and just be extremely vulgar and rude to others. It’s been almost ten years later and this type of behavior clearly has continued to thrive and I feel this is really where this type of issue stems from. We continue to have this mentality both in gaming and on the internet in general that since this is the internet our actions don’t matter and we should not be held accountable for them because “it’s the internet”. I find this logic flawed because we are only making excuses for our poor behavior. We should be holding ourselves to a high standard of treating each other both online and offline. As far as should PewDiePie be getting so much heat from the media ? Of course he should, this type of behavior is both unprofessional and extremely inappropriate, not to mention offensive to many. On the flip side he does apologize and say he’s going to improve his behavior. We will have to wait and see if it improves but after the incident earlier in the year I have to say he’s down to his last strike. We can only take so much unprofessional behavior from the top YouTuber before something needs to change. While I would like to think this is a wakeup call for all of us to perhaps behave in a better way I really just feel this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of this behavior becoming more prevalent and known now that so many people can stream their gaming habits to anyone willing to watch. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
