The term fanboy or Fraternity of Allegiant Nonsensicals & Bought Off Yes-men, gets thrown around a lot these days. There’s terms like Sony Pony or Xbot, but what exactly is a fanboy? It seems to be used out of context and folks are not understanding what it means.

There are many that think because you’re critical of something, this means you’re a fanboy or hater. This is not necessarily the case, a fanboy is blindly devoted to their platform. They will try to defend the indefensible. Negatives are flipped into positives somehow, and benefit of the doubt is given only to that platform. They’ll be excusing the bad saying they’re a (insert console name) centric channel.

We here are critical of a lot on the Xbox side but also PlayStation. We are labeled as Ponies, despite we criticize PlayStation. We thought the Q Lite or whatever was a dumb idea and felt the universal praise of several PS exclusives was unwarranted.

I admit there is more criticism of Xbox, because it is changing for the worst the fastest. We are also disillusioned fans. The game quality has taken a backseat to corporate maneuvers like the buying of publishers and game services. When you see someone whose content focuses on those parts of gaming to tell you why their platform is better, that’s a fanboy and more than likely an influencer paid by the company.

One of the biggest critiques of us, is we make a lot of spelling and grammar errors. I agree we do, but will the only criticism a fanboy will write, and won’t respond to the content of the article. To an extent, it allows us to determine who actually is checking the content of the article. Journalists lie and proofread their articles, but people aren’t applauding their grammar.

From when I was young, I didn’t care who execs were, I just wanted a good game. Fanboys have flipped this and made corpos bigger than the games. They take their talking points as marching orders and will debate the easily debunked.

Hype used to be generated when games looked good. We’ve had several games that looked bad, be hyped as games of the generation, this is fanboyism. When a game of the year or generation came out, gamers knew it. You didn’t have to constantly show us these scores across sites for people to know. Folks were too busy playing the game.

I would qualify several sects of fanboys as religions. They have the text, idols, dogma, waiting for greatness, redemption stories and followers. There’s also certain games that have their own dedicated fanboys. For example we don’t like souls games and feel they’re clunky and badly designed not hard. Ninja Gaiden, side scrolling Prince of Persia, and Cuphead were hard but fair. Despite this, we’ve had the get gud gang looked up my PS profile and say I haven’t played enough to critique. They didn’t think I play on other consoles. One guy showed me his profile and PSN where he platted the game. How is you 100% ing a game going to change my opinion? But if I was praising the games they wouldn’t try and look me up? This is a religion, people will look to give purpose to their actions and existence. In this case, people wanting to make sense to others how much time put into a game.

Watch this video and see if you get it.