On Saturday a post titled “Keemstar’s Drama Alert makes a 62 year old man cry” hit the front page of Reddit. Keemstar is a YouTube celebrity, who hosts a show called “Drama Alert.” The show centers on Keemstar talking about the personal lives and drama of YouTube celebrities. Recently, Drama Alert’s popularity exploded, with their recent exposure on pedophiles in the YouTube Minecraft community, specifically LionMaker.
This video, created by Scarce, told a disturbing story. On Saturday, Keemstar had uploaded a video called “Runecape Sex Offender Returns” that a man called John Phillips, a convicted pedophile who used Runescape to try to have sex with teenagers online, had been released from jail and was now streaming on Twitch, a popular video streaming service.
Turns out that the man Keemstar was talking about was still in jail, and the man streaming was someone else entirely. ‘Sir” Tony Ray is a 62 year old man who does nothing but stream Runescape. He has been streaming for 12 hours a day, for about a month. He would regularly interact with the few viewers he had, and would just spend time enjoying the game.
The internet went insane, grabbing every pitchfork and racial epithet they could find, and headed straight for this guy’s stream. No way are we going to let this pedophile stick around! They bombarded him with hate on his Twitch stream, his Twitter, and his YouTube page. Eventually Drama Alert realized that they had made a mistake and took down the wrongful video, and issued an apology.
Tony, after dealing with all this hate, starts to break down on stream. He says, while crying: “Now everyone in the world knows my real name is Tony Ray Winchester, I’m 62, I’m retired, I haven’t got my first social security check yet, but I’ll get it soon… I’m not going to let someone run me off… but you guys know I’m a good guy now, so I’m going to go take a break.”
It’s a hard video to watch. Tony reminds us of an older father figure in our lives, and to see someone like that so vulnerable really hurts. Tony couldn’t sleep, so he hops back on Runescape after a few hours. At this point Scarce’s video had gone viral, gaining 300,000 views in a few hours. People flooded his stream, this time with positivity. Hearts and “we love you Tony” messages replaced the hate, with the stream reaching over 11,000 viewers that night. At the end of everything Tony says that this went from being the worst night of his life, to one of the best.
For the last seven years “Sir” Tony Ray has played Runescape. It’s the only game he plays. He picked it up for his nephew and ended up loving it himself. His nephews and niece play with him in game, alongside his fellow clan members. Tony started streaming a month ago to try and recruit more members to his clan. As of Monday, he had almost reached 1000 members, enough to fill two whole clans.
What happened is absolutely horrible, no doubt about that. There’s enough Keemstar hate out there, and I have no desire to jump into that mess. As gamers, we sometimes forget about the other people we are playing with. The hate has just become ingrained in the culture, a part of playing online games. I’d be lying if I said I never swore at what was obviously a young kid in League of Legends. You get wrapped up in all the negativity, becoming a part of it.
In 2004, I played a game called “City of Heroes.” It was a multiplayer online game where you created a superhero and went on comic book style adventures. I had never played a game with actual people I could interact with, and I loved it. My sister, under the superhero name “Miss Mischief” and I would go on these 8+ plus hour missions with total strangers who also just loved playing the game. The goal was to have fun, maybe get a badge and a story out of it. We had no voice communication, so nobody really knew who we were.
Times have changed, and the kids of the “Call of Duty” generation swarm like flies to attack their newest victim. Internet mobs have become a norm, with online personalities using their audience to attack whoever is deemed a worthy victim.
People who were raised on the internet sometimes forget that there is another person on the other side of that screen. That there is a real person with feelings you can affect, someone whose day you can create or destroy with a single keyboard swipe.
Tony reminds us of the good the internet can do. He has already forgiven Keemstar, something the rest of the internet might not yet be ready to do. He wants no donations, which is a crazy idea to the hundreds of other Twitch streamers who would kill for this sort of publicity. He just wants to have fun and play Runescape.
Tony’s twitch is http://www.twitch.tv/rsgloryandgold and I recommend you check it out. It will add some positivity to your day. As a great man once said: “Yahhoooo!”