You have to be careful going down that No Country for Old Men, “it is the dismal tide,” route. It’s generally been my experience over twenty-five years of MMO gaming that the worst thing about MMORPGs are the people who play them. On my first day of playing Ultima Online I was lured into a man’s house with promises of swords and shields. “Fantastic weaponry,” he said, “just up these stairs.” He murdered me on his balcony.
It’s tempting to blame the generation, but the truth is a lot of gamers have always been contemptible buttholes.
Having said that, it’s entirely this newfangled Twitch’s fault. It used to be that such behavior was limited to a smaller percentage of a given player base, but now platforms like Twitch allow for a mass proliferation of buttholism. Because, face facts, the murder balcony guy would have been a big hit if Twitch existed back in the nineties. Next thing you know, every other player has a murder balcony on which they seek to lure gormless noobs.
Not only does Twitch encourage braindead discourse (in an endless diarrhea flow of unread nonsense, like the nattering of birds), but the undue influence a single streamer possesses over his legions of horribles has irreversibly damaged the fabric of our good, wholesome Internet! Get off my WoW lawn!