Professional Troll

For anyone who has followed the rise of a "critic" named Jim Sterling, this latest incident is hardly surprising.

On his personal twitter account, he got into a row with a journalist over sexism. Basically, it was a name-calling fest, but Sterling's response was to trot out derogatory hate speech and awful tropes such as "does your husband let you do this" etc. etc.

Personally, I find this horrifying if not all that shocking, coming from Sterling. This is a guy who has made his name in the internet gaming media as being an "un-PC" loudmouth boor who claims the high ground when it comes to video game taste, and yet bases most of his perceptions on the same old boring video game tropes that he seems to lambaste from time to time. He also often takes to the comments section of his own articles to call out people who disagree with him or who he thinks are stupid (and, to be fair, it is Destructoid, so there are a lot of misinformed people on there – of course, one could argue that Sterling himself engenders that kind of culture, but more on that in a bit), which is, beyond violating the tenets of basic etiquette, just terribly unprofessional.

What I find most irritating about him is that (and I'm sure he'd disagree about this, but anyways) he seems to see himself as standing in for the "right" kind of gamer. His "Jimquisition" video rants are basically just five to ten minutes of inarticulate, cuss-y bits of vitriol aimed towards whoever or whatever he feels pissed off at, and they're no fun at all to watch, mainly because he lacks any charm or wit. He's like the Rush Limbaugh of video game criticism, and he seems to try to force his opinion as being the "right" opinion on any given subject, even though I find myself disagreeing with him almost all the time.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm guilty of trying to propagate a certain way of viewing video games, but that's because that's the modus operandi of the site – looking to view video games through a particular critical lens, similar to ideas in the world of literature or film studies. But that's not the MO of Destructoid – they're just trying to be the standard video game news/review site, not really going too much further than that. So when Sterling stirs the pot in his egregious ways ("ha ha, feminist gamers" I'M A FEMINIST GAMER YOU ASSHOLE), I'd like to think that gamers are going there to witness the sad spectacle, but I'm pretty sure that most go there because they actually agree with him. There's nothing wrong with admitting to bias or to preconceived notions or whatever, but Sterling continually tries to position himself above such arguments in the most petulant, petty ways. (Side note, because it doesn't really have anything to do with my argument here, but his prose is really amateurish as well, and not in an entertaining way)

Basically what I'm getting at here is that he's shitty at his job of being a paid video game critic, and yet he's rewarded for it. Note that after calling a female a "cunt" on twitter, he hasn't apologized, hasn't been reprimanded by Destructoid, and almost nothing has come of it. This belies a fundamental racism and misogyny that pops up in his writing all too frequently: he often calls Japanese people "slant eyes," he uses derogatory terms frequently (yes, I just linked to this, but SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL), and as these twitter posts show, he isn't afraid to air out petty, vindictive personal attacks using horrifying language in a public forum. Imagine if the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times did the same.

The fact that he's so popular, and that more and more internet gaming writers want to be like him (naturally because of "the hits," a phenomenon that I've discussed before), isn't just horrifying for me, an aspiring gaming critic; it's horrifying for the entire gaming culture, which, I'm sorry to say, is pretty much completely broken. Sure, there are bastions of hope out there, but too many gaming websites encourage this kind of behaviour because they're not beholden to traditional ethics, and because they really don't give a fuck about female readers. How do the female staff members of Destructoid feel about all of this? If the answer is "fine," then gaming websites are more backwater than I imagined.

If this is a medium that is supposed to garner respect and legitimate, critical thought, and if Destructoid is aspiring to be more than a place that uses sensationalized, poorly thought out invectives as a means to gain traffic, then I call on them to either force Mr. Sterling to publicly apologize or to terminate his position with them. It is not OK for this kind of behaviour to continue, especially not in the 21st century when we should all ostensibly know better. The fact that one of the most-read internet gaming critics is allowed to say these kinds of things, even if his twitter "doesn't represent Destructoid," is reprehensible.

(With all of this being said, I still like a couple of the writers at Destructoid, even if the website isn't really geared towards a reader like me. I find Chad Concelmo and Jonathan Holmes to be quite entertaining and generally a good antidote to Sterling.)