You're actually, literally twisting her words here. For example, where does she say she does not do these things? I mean, you're making the most bullshit possible argument here, you're literally making shit up and pulling shit from thin air. The same thing goes for all of the subsequent quotes you use here, and the snarky "interpretations" you make where you disingenuously add in "but not me" when it's actually nowhere to be found in the text. This is so intellectually dishonest I don't even know what you think you were trying to accomplish.
I'm doing no such thing. If you want to make up a fantasyland reading of the article in which she is including herself as a member of the group she criticizes for not having a real culture beyond mindless consumerism, for being young men in mushroom hats queuing listlessly for posters who don't know how to dress or behave, or for being people who know nothing about social or professional interaction who cause real-life harm because of the online wars they "concoct," I can't stop you. Maybe you know Leigh Alexander's heart and it is pure. But this is simply not a reasonable reading of the text of the article.
So you are confirming she's saying she's a part of this thing she has been covering: "All of us." The key word being "us." Notice that here, at this point, she switches from her describing the group she's been within for years, suggests that lately things have changed (which she immediately gets to explaining), stops using "I" and stops using "us" and begins saying "you": "You should be deeply questioning your life choices if this and this and this are the prominent public face your business presents to the rest of the world." Now it's no longer about all of us, it's saying if this describes you, then you have some hard choices. And it goes on like that, saying if this describes you, you're actually a vocal minority in the sphere of people who play games, and are becoming irrelevant.
This is literally one pronoun in the entire article. It's about a third of the way in. It's obviously there for rhetorical rather than semantic effect, it's not even clear her intent is to say "all of us [as gamers]" as opposed to "all of us [as human beings]" or something similarly broad (I incline towards the latter reading: saying "all of us [as gamers] should be above this" doesn't make sense, since there's no particular normative reason why gamers should be above anything).
You're reading this "things have changed" narrative into the text. I see a "things have been changing and will continue to change" narrative, but I see no indication that all the criticisms of gamers and gamer culture that comprise the first third of the article, and that we're currently talking about, fit into this narrative. Similarly, your "if/then" thesis is a wishful confabulation: there is no if/then in the first part of the article where she's mocking slovenly mushroom-headed manchildren. Her readers begin the article either identifying or not identifying as the mushroom-headed manchildren, and there is no clear reason why they should stop identifying as them just because she tosses in a couple of conditionals. Indeed, later on in the article she explicitly tells the mushroomheads that it's not enough if all of them aren't harassers: their culture is still culpable.
The culture she assigned them at the beginning of the article.
Simply put: there is no deictic shift from "
we (inclusive of you)" to "you" in this article. Alexander makes it quite clear from the beginning of the article that the two groupings are "I ~ we (exclusive of you)" and "they -> you." The deictic shift is from "they" in the first part to "you" in the second - from describing to accusing. There is no shift whatsoever from first to second person. A single use of an
arguably inclusive pronoun "us" a third of the way in doesn't come close to justifying your reading.
