Offensive comparison gets Cyberdunked on Twitter.
On the web of tabloid media and shoddy journalism whenever you want to cure your waning relevance and generate more hate traffic than a Viagra ad featuring animal abuse, there’s always the option to fall back on the trusty Nazi analogy.
And that’s exactly what Paste Magazine writer Garrett Martin did by trivializing the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of a good portion of Europe by making a completely unironic comparison between Adolph Hitler winning Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” and the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Now one of those two is a video game and the other is the perpetrator of some of the worst atrocities in the last couple centuries. Martin doesn’t seem capable of understanding the difference.
Now Garrett has no insight on the industry or video games or Cyberpunk and he can’t particularly write an article at any engaging level for that matter, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the article itself adds nothing and has no insight. It’s effectively a collective of information that more talented writers have already talked about ad nauseum. And since Garrett’s see-nothing know-nothing coverage isn’t enough to engage traffic on its own, he decided to make the conversation about his need to justify his salary.
Here is Martin pretending that his Hitler analogy isn’t really a Hitler analogy.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the game of the year in the same way Hitler was Time’s Man of the Year in 1938—not as an award or accolade, but as a warning and admonishment to the rest of the world. (And no, we are in no way comparing a bad game to history’s greatest monster, but if you’re looking for an example of when an “award” isn’t really an award, Time kind of set the standard back in ‘38.)
I suppose it also doesn’t help that Garrett Martin clearly doesn’t understand the crux of his analogy; that being the circumstances around Time Magazine putting Hitler on the cover as man of the year. But if Garrett understood anything of what he was talking about he probably wouldn’t have written the article.
If you want to know why Paste Magazine put up this headline, I will explain it to you very succinctly. Paste Games has 3,000 followers on Twitter and their Tweet from yesterday registers just about on the “completely irrelevant for a company of your size” Richter scale. In short; nobody cared. Thirteen likes is a good result if you’re the size of MMO Fallout and are literally one person who doesn’t get paid for a website a tiny fraction the size of Paste Magazine.
Rewrite the headline and post it on your main account and you have exponentially more engagement in the span of an hour. Really negative engagement, but ad traffic stats don’t care if those clicks are negative am I right?
And sure all this does is expose Garrett Martin as the type of lazy hack fraud who would gleefully compare a Polish company to Hitler because people hating you and recognizing your general lack of talent as a writer is still better than nobody noticing your existence. Paste Magazine slides in at the eleventh inning stretch with the most embarrassing video gaming take of 2020 and if you’re really itching to read the article in its fullest I recommend doing so with an archived copy.
Garrett Martin has gone into Twitter witness protection and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
