Yesterday, notoriously controversial (for no real reason) YouTube video producer Anita Sarkeesian released the first episode of her "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" series. For those who don't remember, this was a series which was funded by Kickstarter and resulted in one of the largest Internet backlashes on record: "Shitstorm Picard"*, ranking a 10 on The Weather Channel's proprietary TROLL:CON circlejerk impact index. Her humble request was $6,000 to produce a few free YouTube episodes talking about the absolutely shitty treatment the average videogame gives to anything resembling a woman. The Internet responded by sending her hate mail, death threats, rape threats, threats of violence, insults, rape threats, sexual harassment, and rape threats. It also responded by fully funding her Kickstarter and then some, to the point where she wound up getting $150,000, had to massively stretch out her production plans to accomidate a larger budget, and wound up taking much longer than she originally planned. Which also fueled minor trolling for the next few months whenever her name was mentioned.
Given what I've just said, you would expect the actual release of the videos to cause an even larger backlash, possibly even involving physical harm to Anita. But, no actually. The Internet largely ignored the actual videos, and what people did talk about them were largely positive. Even notorious shitheads like The Amazing Atheist couldn't actually complain about anything other than the fact that the video had comments and ratings disabled. (Despite the fact that in the last shitstorm he complained that she didn't do that, because that's how logic works.)
So what changed? It's quite simple: EA did the best thing possible for the Internet: create a shitstorm so large that it can drown out, absorb, and dissipate any other possible shitstorm. The anti-EA circlejerk has been around for a long time, but they recently amplified it to potentially apocalyptic levels by releasing a new SimCity game, and then making it an online-only game with MMO-style multiplayer being the only play option and drastically underprovisioning the servers necessary to play the game. For the last three days I've been unable to view ANY gaming-related media without a constant reminder that EA is the ultimate evil standing between us and a worthy successor to SimCity (the original, 2000, 3000, 4, the SNES one†, as nobody can agree which one they like the best). And this has effectively pacified the Internet with respect to the rest of the entire world. For some reason, the gaming community really, really, REALLY can't do anything other than hate EA right now.
Here's my simple request to you, EA: Keep fucking things up. Spectacularly bad. You're doing more to civilize Internet discourse than you will ever do to actually make good games, you might as well keep yourself in the news as long as possible.
* The National Hurricane Center does not name or track Internet Shitstorms. Neither does The Weather Channel.
† First appearance of Dr. Wright, who also later appeared in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and then in Sim City 64, which was never released in the US because it was on the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (aka the machine that cancels MOTHER sequels)