Last Friday Jimmy Kimmel did a small, rather innocuous segment on his show making fun of YouTube's new gaming service, in which people can watch other people play video games. Yes, read that again; that does sounds ridiculous. I'm not a gamer, so I don't even find the concept of playing video games exciting in the first place (unless it's like old school Mario Party on a Nintendo 64), but I can't even begin to fathom the excitement one would get from watching other people play video games. (Do trust, I've been that person, and it's no fun.)
However, this industry of people watching others play video games is a surprisingly huge one. Fact: YouTube gamer PewDiePie made $7.5 million last year just from narrating himself playing video games on his channel (whaaaat the fuck). And guess how much this weird, vicarious industry is worth? Three billion fuckin' dollars.
Anyway, Kimmel, naturally, being the jokester he is, poked fun at this ludicrous concept, even airing a parody ad of a person watching a person watching a person watching a person watching someone else play video games, which normal people would probably find low-key funny. But members of the gaming community, often overlapping as the biggest trolls on the world wide web (*whispers* G*mer G*te?), were none too happy about this. The video above currently has more than 57,000 thumbs down, marking Kimmel's least popular video to date. And the comments? You can only imagine.
In a new segment last night, Kimmel addressed the hatred he got from this video—"an avalanche of mostly misspelled vitriol." Some of these comments are, I gotta admit, pretty creative ("Get your balls tie them with thick fishing line and jump of a cliff while your cats in a blender and the blender is being used to brush your teeth you sarcastic Mong - sincerely the entire gaming community" [sic]), others are just petty and hateful. Lol, people are so sensi. Watch the talk show host read some of the vitriol in the clip below, and let's all pray they don't come after my ass for this, either:
