Joe Biden vs. Gamers

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Part of a series on Joe Biden. [View Related Entries]

About

Joe Biden vs. Gamers refers to a viral debate and a series of memes and jokes which followed Joe Biden calling an unknown video game industry person a creep in his January 2020 interview with The New York Times. After the interview was reported on by gaming industry media, jokes and memes about Biden opposing gamers were circulated online, primarily on Twitter, 4chan and Reddit.

Origin

On January 17th, 2020, The New York Times published an interview with former Vice President of the United States and a candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination Joe Biden.^[1] In one portion of the interview, Biden reminisces about meeting with the leaders in the Silicon Valley, proceeding to call an unknown influential person in the video game industry a "creep" for "coming up with games [that] teach you how to kill people."

[Biden] And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America. And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- -- close to a billionaire -- who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the…
[The New York Times] Like video games.
[Biden] Yeah, video games.

On January 19th, 2020, gaming news outlet VG247^[2] reported on the interview, writing "Joe Biden calls Silicon Valley game developers "little creeps" who make games that “teach you how to kill"." The tweet^[3] made by VG247 account on the same day received over 1,100 retweets and over 5,000 likes in two days (shown below). In the following days, more outlets covered the news, including articles by Techspot,^[4] Screenrant^[5] and The Next Web.^[6]

Spread

Following the spread of the news, tweets condemning Biden were posted by multiple users on Twitter, with several threads about the interview also created on 4chan's /v/ board.^[7]^[8]^[9] For example, January 19th, 2020, tweet^[10] by @pixelatedboat received over 480 retweets and 4,900 likes (shown below, left). A same-day tweet^[11] by Gamer President Ace Watkins received over 1,300 retweets and 13,800 likes (shown below, right).

On Reddit, posts and memes about the interview were posted in /r/technology,^[12] /r/Gamingcirclejerk,^[13] /r/GamersRiseUp^[14] and other subreddits. For example, a January 20th post about the interview in /r/technology^[12] received over 125,000 upvotes in one day. A same-day post in /r/fakehistoryporn^[15] received over 74,500 upvotes in twelve hours.