!steamdeck /claim
The Game Awards last night were, as you may be aware, a bit of a shambles. Between awkward jokes, Al Pacino’s failed attempts to read the teleprompter, and some kid apparently getting arrested for crashing the Elden Ring GOTY acceptance, the chat was an utter mess.
As the carnage erupted on stage, those watching online had to deal with a bombardment of tomfoolery wrought by prospective Steam Deck giveaway winners spamming !steamdeck and /claim into the chat.
I feel like I was only able to catch a few comments relating to the actual games being shown, with the majority of non Steam Deck hopefuls only managing to get in the odd bewildered comment.
For anyone wondering, the format of the spam messages (those exclamation marks and forward slashes at the start) is that of Linux shell commands, which leads me to suspect devout Gabenists having a hand in the unprecedented uprising.
A Gabenist being one who pertains to the belief Gabe Newell, the “omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent overlord of PC gaming,” and head of Valve, “long ago created the Universe purely out of Steam.” F**king Urban Dictionary.
(Image credit: The Game Awards)
The exclamation mark in !steamdeck I assume is meant to execute specific commands, as in “gimme a goddamn Steam Deck, Gabe.” Though the spammers missed a necessary space, so I’m not sure what good it will have done them.
The forward slash in /claim is in reference, no doubt, to its use in root file path names within systems. It implies that /claim is an absolute path that one can simply jump to by spamming it. Nice try.
Honestly, its nice to see people joining together in hope, but at points my entire screen was awash with the commands. It’s hard to say whether this was a case of herd mentality, or a coordinated takeover, but one thing’s for sure: it certainly filled Game Awards atmosphere with an unforgettably chaotic air for anyone watching online.
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