re: 'Games were supposed to be a fun career choice: Now I'm afraid I'll get murdered

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Last week, even a figure so beloved as Minecraft’s Notch said that he had started receiving death threats after the free server for Minecraft got shut down. The piece focuses on Robert Bowling, who served as the creative strategist for Infinity Ward when it was making the Call of Duty series. He says that the vast, vast majority of threats seem to come from kids and other people who don’t pose anything close to a real threat, and that absorbing them in stride is just part of what comes with being a public figure in games.

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For him, it was like this: “We make an internal decision. Internal decision goes live. YouTube personality disagrees with the decision, makes video rallying the troops against the decision, troops go forth and figure out ways to express that disagreement. That process of finding ways to express the disagreement would typically be a series of trying to one-up each other. It would start with nasty messages online. It would turn into trying to hack my accounts.” The hacking would trigger a battery of e-mails to Bowling regarding attempts to recover “forgotten” passwords. “Once they failed at that, the phone calls and e-mails and the next step of threats would come.”

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It’s wild that people who make things that are ultimately inconsequential entertainment should be the subject of so much ire, but gamers are a passionate lot. Unfortunately, the internet gives a loud voice to people who represent only a very small portion of any given community. People sometimes take to the internet to tell someone how much they like their work, but more often people do so to tell people how much they hate something.

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