Disclaimer: Content contains excessive links.  Reader discretion is advised.

Since June 22, I have been posting an editorial of varying topics each Sunday afternoon.  Occasionally, my creative juices hit a mental block, and the articles don't go up until dinner time.  The first Sunday Special wasn't actually a Sunday Special so much as a fangirl's homage to one of the best shooter games ever, Team Fortress 2.

Sunday Specials were first intended to be a celebration of video game characters, inspired by an influx of Top 10 lists at Neoseeker's sister site GameGrep.  They were amusing to write but grew old quite quickly for me as a writer.  Each one was met with a mixture of comments, ranging from praise to criticism from the incredibly humorless.  Aside from the sheer difficulty of finding enough characters that I cared about enough to write about each week, I realized after just a few such articles that my target audience was simply too small.  Resident Evil's Albert Wesker, Silent Hill 4's Henry Townshend, Portal's GLaDOS, and Soul Calibur's Siegfried Schtauffen were the lucky four who got their own feature entries before the Sunday Specials took a different turn.

Four articles later, I veered away from individual characters and channeled my own personal brand of feminism into an editorial about female gamers.  However, every one of these articles and those that followed have one thing in common: satire.  Now twelve articles in, Sunday Specials are still misunderstood as news to be taken seriously as fact, and I want to dissolve this misconception to avoid ridiculously idiotic comments in the future.  More difficult than herding cats, I know.

First, let's familiarize ourselves with satire.  The dictionary definition is as follows:

1. a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2. trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

It is safe to say satire is humor based on the obvious.  A famous and personal favorite comedian who employ satire is Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, who imitates a news anchor on his show, The Colbert Report.  His book operates on the same brand of humor and can be essentially described as a chain of lies, meaning every word out of his mouth or printed on a page is in direct contradiction with what he truly believes.

Sunday Specials have evolved in such a way.  Writers, like established comedians, have a unique voice that they create and flesh out, and readers sometimes relate to that persona or find articles (and other written works) easier to grasp depending on that voice.  In recent Sunday Specials, I've employed a voice of authority to explain annoyances prevelant in the gaming community, and the humor lies in the seriousness, which isn't actually meant to be taken seriously -- get it?

Let me use a more concrete and relevant example.  Take last Sunday's editorial, titled "Which Console is Right for You?," for example.  The article really doesn't lay out hard facts about each console that gamers haven't already heard through news or forum discussions, and the entire thing banks on the idea of picking consoles based solely on stereotypes pertaining to each machine and who buys them.  Xbox 360s suffer from RRoD, PlayStation 3 is the most expensive console, the Wii is the casual gamer's machine.  Following me so far?

And yet the article received some peculiar comments from curiously offended fanboys, the very people I tend to make fun of the most in my articles.  Readers who lack a sarcasm detector leave behind their thoughts, which sadly fulfills one of the listed PS3 stereotypes:

"They can also be quite sensitive, quick to jump to their console's defense at any given opportunity."

A number of readers responded, and three in particular leapt out at me because they helped support a stereotype, so moved by the grievous wrongs committed toward the PlayStation 3 by my piece that they contributed to an article on Neoseeker for the very first time (none of them had Neo accounts, only emails).  One particular PS3 owner was irked by the belief that his beloved machine is still viewed as one of the most expensive platforms on the market, and he was kind enough to post under the name "PS3Owner":

I wish people would stop labelling the PS3 as "by far the most expensive" without any attempt to explain the reasons behind the price. I know this article was tongue in cheek but it still bugs me...

... If you sit down and work it out, the fully-loaded price of a 360 Arcade to bring it to a comparable spec as the PS3 is actually $820 (increasing by $50 each year), which makes the PS3's $399 price tag more than reasonable...

Indeed, "bugged" PS3 owner!  Stereotypes make us all very angry people -- grr grr!  Following that well-written though is another (alleged) PS3 owner calling himself "Playstation freak":

PS3 owns bitches

Eloquent to a fault, that one.  Keep in mind that I did not target the PlayStation 3 any more than its competitors, and no 360 or Wii owners were insulted enough to post a response.

I think our schools need to start teaching literary devices again because trying to educate readers through the internet might not work out so well.  On the other hand, reader Nathan Fido had the right idea when he commented, "Nice article, certainly gave me a laugh."  Subtle humor is the underlying purpose of these articles, after all, including this one.

Nevertheless, I will end this Sunday article by reiterating its ultimate point.  Sunday Specials are satirical editorials that poke fun at an aspect of the gaming community most of us are already quite aware of.  Perhaps Neo reader Gussimotto said it best in his comment:

I look forward to Sunday Specials, they're always fun to read.

Hint: the keywords are in bold.

With each editorial often bordering more on blog post, I open myself to criticism more than a weekday news entry might.  That being said, being able to understand the articles themselves might make the negative comments a little more substantial.