About

Heated Gaming Moment is a sarcastic slang term applied to instances where a person does something offensive such as use a racial or sexual slur while playing video games. The term was coined by writer Ian Miles Cheong while defending PewDiePie after he said the N-word on Stream.

Origin

On September 10th, 2017, YouTuber Felix Kjellberg aka PewDiePie broadcast a livestream of himself playing the game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, in which he entered a gunfight on a bridge. After firing at an enemy player, he blurted out a racial slur before apologizing and saying "I don't mean that in a bad way" (shown below).

That day, journalist Ian Miles Cheong defended Kjellberg in a tweet referring to the incident as a "heated gaming moment" (shown below).^[1]

Spread

Cheong's tweet prompted Twitter users to begin mocking the "heated gaming moment" defense. For example, user @deportablediz posted a video of himself in parody of the "heated gaming moment" in which he gets killed in a video game and repeats the 14 Words, a famous white supremacist slogan (shown below).

User @cushbomb^[2] joked that the Holocaust was ordered during a "heated gaming moment," gaining over 720 retweets and 4,100 likes (shown below, left). User @BrandyLJensen^[3] claimed the defense was "like the purge for racism," gaining over 160 retweets and 1,600 likes (shown below, right). The jokes were covered by Mic^[4] on September 12th.

Website Pointandclickbait^[7] wrote a satirical article titled "Great Heated Moments In Gaming History" in which they told made-up stories of gamers engaging in racism after growing frustrated with a video game. One example reads:

After missing an easy dodge in Dark Souls and being slain by a capra demon, gamer Ruben Morrison was furious. Throwing his controller aside, Morrison stormed into the garage, picked up a can of paint and a ladder, and painted a 25-foot swastika on his Jewish neighbour’s roof. Wow! An easy mistake that anybody could make, and certainly something the non-racist Morrison would never normally do.

The term was used sarcastically on Reddit, and particularly on /r/Gamingcirclejerk, to describe instances where gaming and violence are intertwined. For example, a November 2nd, 2017 post by user stonedkyuby^[5] used a headline about Osama Bin Laden being a gamer to describe 9/11 as a "heated gaming moment," gaining over 430 points (shown below, left). User timothanb^[6] posted a headline about a man's "Xbox rage" causing him to go on a shooting spree and described it as a "heated gaming moment," gaining over 120 points (shown below, right).

On February 13th, 2019, musician Deadmau5 was banned from Twitch for calling someone a gay slur on stream, in what many sarcastically called a "heated gaming moment."^[8]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References