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Comment by jakebasile | Hacker News Reader

You're mystified by it because you probably aren't a dedicated gamer. To lots of people, including myself, gaming is a huge part of their identity and lifestyle. It's a hobby like any other such as repairing old cars, painting, craft beer, etc.

The "but climate change" is just whataboutism because gaming isn't important to you, so why aren't people paying more attention to what is important to you.

edit to clarify: This may sound a little hostile but it isn't intended as such. I'm just explaining that some people really do care about this stuff just as you really care about your own hobbies or pet cause.

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> It's a hobby like any other such as repairing old cars, painting, craft beer, etc.

And yet you don't see people who follow those hobbies throwing an absolute fit like gamers are now doing continuously.

In a group of consumers of an industry that is larger than the film and music industries combined (and this was before casual gaming took off), you are going to get some people who are louder and more committed than others.

Maybe they are not online to the same extend?

Because emacs-vs-vim used to a flame-war guarantee, and the stupid thing is that nobody is impacted by another persons text-editor, unless they are sharing a computer that can't have both installed (so anything with more than 30mb hd)

I regularly observe people flipping out because a corporation changed the license of a product to allow them to get more profit and more people being angry about the choice of webbrowser or whitespace character.

A big part of that is comparative population size, and the general "connectedness" of the fanbases. All online communities are trending worse and worse, and gaming is not unaffected.

I double dare anybody to show me an even remotely comparable example of people getting so angry about fishing gear or woodworking tools.

As someone who self-exiled from the gaming community, there are also people within the community, including journalists, who beat on the war drums in order to rile up gamers.

For the last ~4 years, everything from game reviews that gamers disagreed with, to character stencils, have been positioned as the worst things to ever happen to gaming. Some in the community liken it to actual discrimination against gamers.

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