'Death threats' in this context mostly being the stuff being spammed as comments in places such as Youtube. And by media, I mean whatever the people making the 'death threats' are watching.
Topic:
Jimmy Kimmel Live did a bit where they had a fun laugh at people watching other people playing videogames:
It received more dislikes and angry comments than any video they've ever posted. They made a couple more videos to laugh at that:
Last night, they went to Maker Studios and spent an hour with a couple Let's Players, which resulted in this video, which can be interpreted however you want?:
My opinions:
(I have no idea how to think about all of this, these are simply my current thoughts in ramble form.)
First, I think labelling people who make those comments as 'gamers' encourages them to group together and do it even more, but I also personally think this is an example of too many 'death threats' being posted in the gaming community. There's lots of events such as this that happen in a variety of ways, but when someone takes it seriously enough to say it's crossing the line, the main response I often see is, "it wasn't that bad." I'm disagreeing with that response here.
I was then thinking about why people watch Let's Play videos. There's different reasons, but one example I came up with is it could be funny and dramatic to watch two of those people making the threats play together on the same team and lose. Now, I'm wondering if that's a significant cause of the 'problem?': streamers being encouraged to be overly dramatic, desensitizing a specific but significant(?) group of viewers to threats.
As a side note, I'd like to say I don't think Youtube channels such as PewDiePie make their viewers 'dumber.' Imo viewers go to channels for whatever reason they want, they get what they want from the videos, without it making them any 'worse off.' Imo this article presents a good argument of why I think that:
http://kotaku.com/what-people-get-wrong-about-pewdiepie-youtubes-biggest-1673109786
I joined hubski because I was looking for discussions that encourage thoughtfulness over popular drama. I like the discussions here, but outside of hubski, I pretty much only read gaming news. One thing I noticed here is that, for better or worse, there's relatively little gaming discussion here compared to other general discussion sites that I've joined.
So overall, I'm wondering if the gaming community should make more of an effort to move somewhere and stamp out at least some of the threats. A hypothetical example would be Youtube, which has just launched a 'gaming live' service, could separate gaming users from youtube users. The gaming 'site' would be a less convenient place to make accounts that post threats without consequences amongst a crowd of desensitised users.
Question:
How much do you think the focus on 'overly dramatic' entertainment in media (such as gaming streams) is contributing to 'death threats?' How much of a problem do you think it is or will be? Depending on your answer, as a follow-up I ask if you think channels such as PewDiePie make Youtube (or maybe just his viewers) 'dumber?'