Anonymity is buffer for consequence. Perhaps that’s why in our era religious texts and pitchforks have been replaced by keyboards and broadband connections. Granted, we live in a time of donning masks: the lonely are led to Second Life, videogames imitate power fantasy, and intolerance is epitomized by a faceless crowd, who stare at computer screens and treat dissonance as a disease.

Fanatical response to game reviews is less an exception than it is something of an unspoken rule; stretch the imagination just a little and the internet rabble becomes a religious mob, burning heretical reviewers at the stake. Likewise, when praise for a game is on the menu, the pious mass will just as readily bow down, douse the flames they created, and kiss a reviewer’s feet.

Somewhere along the line, sincere passion for videogames turned to veneration, and the reverence of reviews followed suit. And in a time in which avatars and display pictures are more accountable for online discourse than the person mouthing off behind the online pretence, it seems as though gamers find personal worth in delivering dogma alongside a commonly belligerent community.

Like Metal Gear Solid IV and Halo 3 before it, the case and point of the moment, Killzone 2, is also emblematic of that recurring goal to crucify critics. But rather than the lambasted dissenters, whose lone reviews are guaranteed to garner response from the severely crazed, it’s the reaction to positive reviews that also puts cultic inclination on display.

“This reviewer doesn’t seem so enthusiastic. Different reviewer plz.”
– User: whitefroDK4, IGN Killzone 2 review by Jeff Haynes

In a world where hyperbole awards are held at the end of the year – shaming sites that have a particular knack for misleading their audience – user whitefroDK4’s response starts to make sense. To put it into context, what he and so many others want isn’t an assessment, but a sermon; a preacher to indoctrinate predisposition, rather than evaluate and critique.

What separates the normal from the irate is a mystery in the same vein as whatever spurs people to believe in a reality in which witches walk the earth. If a game is put on a pedestal, conversation between audience and reviewer turns to a single sided shouting match wherein one drowns the other’s voice. Yet just as often, that same group might be civil when they don’t have preconceived notions about a game and would, in all honesty, just like an impression of its quality.

The cause that separates the two can only be determined through guesswork, but there is certainly an innumerable amount of effect:

“You get payed for such incredulous writings?”

And,

“This review embodies the toxic, vile, cheap and nasty wh0re that the gaming media has become. yes, that’s right chris, you’re a wh0re, a nasty, vile, toxic and cheap WH0RE.”

– Anonymous comments, TVG Killzone 2 review by Chris Leyton

Every review seems to have a shadowy conspiracy lurking behind it. Every reviewer has some detrimental defect that should prevent them from doing their job. This week critic X is a dirty corporate whore, and the next, he or she is a saint when the evaluation of a game matches the stars of truth that a bigoted audience prescribe.

Maybe one night, when the kids get tired of placing games on that holy mountain, they’ll also shine a flashlight under their beds and realize that the boogeyman they’ve been screaming about isn’t actually there. Even then, though, who’s to say they don’t continue puncturing critics with their pitchforks. Because, if the nature of the medium itself is anything to go by, making noise behind a different face is what comes naturally for our era.