I never wanted to write an article about fanboys, but after a bit of work and a lot of painful nights on 4chan, a couple of different insights have sprung on me and i feel it necessary to share them both as a means to hopefully prevent fanboy rage but also as a means of showing how it will continue to get worse and worse as time goes on.

For those of you who weren’t around back in the day, I can assure you that there were console wars back in the day of SNES and Sega. In some ways they are similar, in regards to the blatant smearing and misinformation that corporations like to engage in, on the micro-level however, the war wasn’t nearly as bad.

The internet has been around for a long time, but back in the day, even if you had the internet, you probably didn’t use it to look up video gaming websites. Chances are however, that if you had the internet, it was as slow as the morning after your 18th birthday. The internet was slow, intolerable, and most people didn’t even have it. Simply put, the rapid improvement of the internet has now only allowed a higher rate of transmission for fanboy antics, but also allowed more people to become embroiled in the war in the first place.

With no internet, there was only one way you could figure out if a console or a game was actually good: By actually playing it. Print video game magazines were much more viable in the 90’s then they are today, but most kid’s didn’t have enough money or enough care to go out and buy them on a regular basis. I was addicted to video games, and I only had 4 or 5 of them. That being said, one of these magazines recommended Final Fantasy 3, which was good advice at the time (and is to this date as a matter of fact). If you actually took the time to play your friend’s Genesis or N64, you’d quickly realise that the console was just as good as the next, because it had good GAMES.

Console’s aren’t about games though nowadays. They are about Blu-ray, Netflix, friendcodes and a million other things. This is not to say we have lost our way, but as technology progressed, so did consoles. Sure the SNES had a better sound card and the Genesis had BLAST PROCESSING, but both consoles produced practically identical graphics (much the same way they do now). Of course, with more console adaptability comes more scrutiny from the people outside of the normal gaming world. Press, movie companies, soccer moms, what have you. Outside pressures such these tend to manifest themselves in the gaming world as the ESRB, Shitty movie-to-games and ignorant press members who do not know what trouble their words can start. The Hip-Hop Gamer said it best when addressing allegations that he was a PS3 fanboy:

“The reason I defend the PS3 more than the Xbox is because of the amount of misinformation about it. Some people don’t know any better.”

With consoles expanding to newer markets, they inevitably must appeal to people that simply don’t know much about them. This creates another fanboy mentality. They need to say why their console is better. They need to prove to the people around the world that they made the right decision. This however is the point that I believe best encapsulates the rise of the fanboy and why he is around to stay.

If you’re Canadian, chances are you hate people from the U.S. And vice versa. Canadians are lumberjacks, Americans are warmongers, the list goes on and on. If you are smart enough to realise that this kind of mentality is incredibly moronic, congratulations, chances are you’re smart enough to ignore this fanboy war. If not, you are falling into the same ideological trap that nationalists do. The reason why Canadians hate Americans, the English hate the French and Croatians hate Serbians is the same reason why Xbox 360 owners hate PS3 owners and vice versa: BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME.

As consoles steadily become more and more like computers, they steadily begin to have the same features. Online gameplay, online stores, wireless headsets, multiplatform games, internal hard drives, USB memory sticks, etc etc. The easiest way to validate your own identity is to invalidate the identity of the person closest to you. By saying Canadians love peace, you indirectly define yourself against Americans who supposedly encourage war. By talking about the PS3 being too expensive, you indirectly state that the Xbox is at a more appropriate price.

As I say I will say in a forthcoming article, gaming has become a part of my identity. Although I am smart enough not to need to validate my purchase or invalidate the purchase of others, I sometimes feel the need to fight back. Undoubtedly, this is because my identity is being challenged as an offshoot of choice of console.

While I may be cognizant of these facts, most aren’t. This problem is confounded as a new generation of adolescent gamers enter into the market; Combining their identity formation through puberty with their identity through gaming will only lead to an increase in fanboy behavior. What is the solution? Unfortunately, much like piracy, there is no solution that can prevent the problem from continuing to spread. Even if the entire gaming industry comes together to try to cutoff the head of fanboy behavior, it probably still won’t be enough.

Fanboy’s are here to stay, I hope you have comfortable ear plugs.