In 2018, let’s stop pretending abusive fans are ‘passionate’
Guest Contribution
2017 was a year of grim milestones, and its tail end offered one more to add to the painfully long list: the first confirmed death from a gamer-initiated swatting. Swatting, the practice of calling a SWAT team to the house of a target by fraudulently reporting a serious crime at their address, has finally done exactly what critics of toxic video game culture have long feared, and claimed a life.
The recent death of Andrew Finch, slain when a feud between two Call of Duty players ended in a SWAT team being summoned to his home in Wichita, Kansas, leads us into a thorny thicket of questions that demand introspection from policymakers, technology and gaming studio executives, and fan communities. Reflecting on change and self-improvement is…
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