You’re finished? Well allow me to retort, Pc Gamer. Recently you published what is likely your most troll bait post ever. “Let’s Stop Calling Ourselves the Master Race” received over 3,000 comments on your site and loads more on Facebook. In the piece the writer, Tyler Wilde, claims that Pc players referring to the system and themselves as the “master race” is offensive and needs to stop. He goes on to state the term is stale and abrasive and that he wants to “distance myself from the Aryan Brotherhood”. Whether the term is stale or not is a matter of opinion and Mr. Wilde, who is a much more successful writer than I, is entitled to his. What prompted my rebuttal of this piece isn’t a defense of the term itself but more of an annoyance with the tone of this article and the thousands more that are similar to it.
I play a ton of video games and at this point in my life I play nearly exclusively on pc. I paid more than I even want to admit on this stupid computer and I spend more time than I care to talk about fiddling with it. I know the inside of several popular game’s engines like the back of my hand. I’ve BETA tested and Alpha tested and supported indie devs. And what do i get for this? I get marketing in big box stores that panders to the sweetheart deals they have with consoles. I get console companies giving incentives for exclusivity. I get pc component manufacturers who know their market is a niche and treat it that way with pricing and availability. Do I feel “superior” to someone who plays solely on Ps4? No. Does anyone? Probably but that’s not because of this “culture” we’ve created but because they’re pretentious little brats and they’re going to find something else to act superior over anyway.
As said in the PC Gamer article itself, the term is a joke. It was coined to make fun of ourselves and the aforementioned nerdy/neckbeardish pretentiousness that can often be exhibited on WoW servers, in a game of LoL or Dota or many others. I know personally whenever I use it, it’s with an eye-roll. Oh Pc sure is glorious, if you have the money and the desire to maintain a system. Yes it does outperform consoles from a graphical standpoint (if the computer is good enough) but nothing about owning a gaming machine makes me better than anyone and anybody with half a brain completely understands that.
I would argue that people who claim this offends them need to get off the internet not that the internet needs the PC police to start handing out citations for everybody who posts a master race meme. By these standards of not “making people uncomfortable” we would need to cancel South Park and Family Guy and burn every episode of Beavis and Butthead. We should, by this philosophy, force Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle to retire their acts because nothing remotely racially charged should ever be said as it may hurt some overly sensitive person with no sense of humor’s feelings.
Is the phrase stale? It probably is honestly but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s really not that offensive. It doesn’t bother anyone who doesn’t choose to let it and trying to insinuate it needs to be replaced is only going to make people hang on to it more dearly. The comment threads everywhere this article was posted all but prove the last point. Countless Pc users were claiming their allegiance to this vile “master race” with few comments in agreement with the piece.
So I’m sorry Pc Gamer but this Pc user may still occasionally say master race or drop the intermittent peasantry joke. I might even still reference Gabe Newell as “LorD GabeN”. As out of date and stale as that is I like it and I’m don’t care what Mr. Wilde has to say about it.
