I think the article's kind of ridiculous because it never establishes an actual correlation; there's just vague gestures at "people in these forums liked this website" which is kind of meaningless when Old Man Murray was a product of a certain style of humor around that era. That doesn't necessarily excuse the quoted bits, of course, but they existed in a different context, when comedy boundaries were a little different (for the worse, tbh) and when the militant anti-SJW/anti-PC brigade wasn't defending it with their lives. It was part of a wider landscape.
There's five or six steps missing from how we get from there, where it was stuff like Old Man Murray and South Park and whatever else, to here, where that style of humor is primarily the language of people who take part in harassment campaigns and hate speech. And the article doesn't really cover any of that, nor does it convincingly draw enough of a direct correlation that we can ignore how far-removed Old Man Murray and stuff like it actually is.
You can probably argue that wider landscape played a part, but at that point it's so broad that citing Old Man Murray as some sort of ground zero is pretty much useless. I've seen a lot of people dismissing this article on Twitter as "the writer was holding a grudge," and whether or not that's the case, it totally reads that way for this reason. It narrows the issue to the point of being basically nonsensical, all the while quoting people who like OMM and were influenced by it only to disingenuously make them look like lunatics by playing dumb about why anyone holds it in any regard in the first place - there's a line that says "whatever OMM's brilliance is supposed to be, I have no idea" or something to that effect. There's no mention of, like, the whole Time to Crate thing for example; an article like this isn't obligated to be even-handed or anything, but when it willfully omits basic historical background to build its narrative, it stops looking like a trustworthy analysis. Treating Chet's refusal to answer what sounds like an ambush as some sort of "GOTCHA!" moment is insane, too.
All that said, any time I've actually gone back and tried to read Old Man Murray I couldn't do it because, yeah, some of the humor was too edgy + tryhard and/or it just felt sorta poorly-paced.
I thought GAF was better than this. Defending these terrible 'jokes', I guess people really do love Valve a bit too much.
Tim Schafer was very anti-Gamergate and now has Wolpaw writing Psychonauts 2. I don't want to support his writing in any way.
Wolpaw might still stand by this stuff, sure, but it's been over 17 years and the comedy landscape has changed a hell of a lot. I wouldn't hold him to the comedy standards of the late 90s and early 00s.
