Earlier today, I was reading an article on retro gaming site Time Extension. The article was quite interesting — it was about the struggles academics were encountering in getting today’s students (18 year olds) to engage with anything other than Minecraft or Fortnite. It’s a good read, and I encourage you to take a few minutes and give it a look.
That’s not what I want to talk about today, though. I want to talk about this comment I found underneath it.
The “vulgar (or profane) language”, by the way, was the word “damn”, used in the context of the phrase “didn’t give a damn”.
Intrigued, I decided to delve into “Mario500″‘s comment history. And what I found didn’t make things any clearer. Because this is what I found:
I was immediately fascinated. Who is this person, and why do they seem to think they’re the editor of Time Extension? Why do they ask questions about things a regular reader of Time Extension — and particularly a Nintendo fan — would almost inevitably be very familiar with? Why do they constantly refer to themselves in the third person (except in their earliest comments)? Why do they put everything in brackets?
I’m particularly fascinated by their apparent inability to understand sarcasm or exaggeration for comic effect, but for the life of me I cannot work out if they’re taking the piss, if it’s someone who really does think and talk like this — entirely possible that they’re someone on the autistic spectrum, for example — or if they’re a bot.
The bizarrely Puritan attitude throughout is odd, too. Besides the initial “vulgar (or profane) language”, there’s another comment that uses the exact same phrasing, along with one that offers “(suggestion: no hoping for swearing)” when an interview with a fan translator expresses that they hope the official release of a game keeps the naughty language intact, and possibly my favourite, “(suggestion: never insult thy self (or any other (separate) self))” in response to an article writer self-deprecatingly calling themselves a “moron” for selling their Gamecube setup.
I’m intrigued by Mario500’s first comment, too. It lacks the later “gimmicky” elements of their subsequent replies, instead simply stating “This article could have been much more objective if I were involved in its creation.”
They offer no further explanation of exactly how they would make the article — a lengthy feature about the history of media mogul Robert Maxwell’s involvement in the games industry — any more “objective” than it already is, but chances are they, for some reason, took umbrage at the description of Maxwell’s “shady business practices” in the article. But, I mean, those are pretty established facts at this point; no amount of “objectivity” (which, under these sorts of circumstances, generally means “stop saying mean things about bad people I like”) can really spin it another way. Maxwell was a shit; he didn’t deserve to die (probably), but he was still a shit.
(note: the creator of this message was unable to finish reading this article immediately upon finding vulgar (or profane) language among its text)
Anyway, I’m baffled. The rest of their profile on Time Extension is completely barren, they rarely get responses to their bizarre comments and I’m still not entirely unconvinced that they’re a bot.
Still, it was a mild diversion earlier today. I thought you might be interested to see the stranger side of the Internet.
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