David Stone's blog

I'm sure nobody has missed this, but I felt compelled to write something after reading a recent comment on the front page of the site. Pushing my tolerance to the brink, I'm ashamed to bring you David the Grammar Nerd, Volume 3: Thinking Before You Speak.

While I covered basic Netiquette in the previous installment, I think it's important to continue. I'm not sure why, but when people are on the internet, they feel some sort of license to say whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it.

We've seen this come up recently with Xbox Live explaining how they determine what is or is not acceptable on the service. Stephen Totilo posted an interesting interview on Kotaku explaining how new vernacular had to be monitored constantly and for context. But sometimes, people can be both plain hurtful, or to quote Mike Bracken, "retarted" (yes, full of irony).

*sigh* I can't believe that I have to even talk about this. But it's time the Internet grew up.

It's time once again for David the Grammar Nerd. This post is not so much about grammar as it is touching on how to accurately express yourself.

With the recent rush of quality user reviews coming in, it's nice to see that there are a lot of people who know how to write and communicate effectively. Unfortunately, with many Internet scribes using "lol" as punctuation, it's time for the first (and hopefully final, but I doubt it) installment of David: The Grammar Nerd.

Every so often, you hear the word "credibility" come up on a website. For whatever reason, people seem to forget what it means, and when it's called into question, people get awfully uppity about it. The problem is, credibility is subjective. And how to defend credibility is up to the speaker.

The word "exclusive" has been a major buzzword since the NES days. But the times, they are a-changin’. Third-party titles are costing more money than ever before, and to put a game out on a single system is now no longer a viable option. The bottom line: few “exclusives” are exclusive anymore. And I couldn’t be happier.

I was perusing my usual slate of gaming news sites when I came across a story about some pre-pubescent kid trying to be all “cool” while trying to join a guild. He used such colorful phrases as “I wouldn’t mind if a girl raped me” while attempting to show his supposed manliness (or, at least, I assume that’s what he was trying to do). When told that it could mean something else, he replied, “But girls don’t have a pee pee!”

Gaming is evolving faster than any medium in recent memory. Can we even keep up? With every generation, you only have to look at the pre-redendered cut-scenes to know what the following generation's graphics will realistically look like.

Our controller has morphed—to use a Kojima-style metaphor—from a table with two chairs to a lush banquet hall, replete with different food stations, a martini bar and even that cool Greek cheese that gets lit on fire when it's brought to your table. In short, we're living in a gaming world of excess.