To reiterate what several people on page 7 are saying, I think that eyebeams' is directing his criticism on gamers when it is more apt to
people on the internet. Look on the comments of any video on Youtube and you'll find toxic jerkwads. When News agencies discovered the internet and started allowing comments on their stories, they had to soon stop or monitor them because of all the toxic jerkwads commenting on the news stories/news anchors/news blogs.
A few pages ago Eyebeams mentioned someoen who said "I haven't reade this book but it sucks and you should steal it", honestly I'd expect that attitude from video gamers to movie goers who pirate media.
I mean eyebeams point about gamers being cynical? Talk to comic book nerds, movie nerds or video gamer nerds. They are
quite cynical about "The man" and the industry of their choice's decisions. The amount of Hatred that EA is gettign now for Downloadable Content (DLC) is monumental in the circles that I go around. The internet runs on cynicism and flaming.
It just takes a few toxic jerkwads to really sink any sort of discussion/comments/etc. And a company who experiences this jerkwadiness in a target demographic is likely just going to ignore that demographic because they don't want to deal with it.
It may be that tabletop RPG fans do not have a statistically higher percentage of "toxic jerkwads" (I love that phrase) than any other segment of society . . . . but there remains a perception among those outside of the hobby that we do have more jerkwads than any other segment of society.
I'm suspicious that it's not only that, but more that the Gamer demographic is a small community, compared to other demographics. And even if we have the same proportion of toxic jerkwads as other demographics, the small size makes the jerkwads seem more significant.
So I don't think there is anything particularly unique about the Gaming community, despite eyebeams framing it that way. It's just that eyebeams happened to experience it from this community and not another.
So, as others have pointed out, it's not eyebeams just taking shots at the community as an outsider who hates gamers. He is a gamer. He is taking shots as someone who is seeing how
Outsiders respond to the jerkwads in this community, and assume that the jerkwads make up the community, thus writing the community off.