Last night's Game Awards (opens in new tab) was, as you know, a bit of a shambles. With awkward jokes, Al Pacino trying to read the teleprompter and failing, and a kid getting arrested for crashing Eldenring's GOTY awards ceremony (opens in new tab), the chat was a mess.

While the carnage unfolded on stage, those watching online had to deal with the storm of tomfoolery that the prospective winners of the Steam Deck giveaway (opens in new tab) caused by spamming the chat with !steamdeck and /claim. Incidentally, Valve was giving away a 512GB Steam Deck every minute.

I think the only comments I was able to catch were related to the actual game, and most people who didn't want a Steam Deck were only able to put in the odd puzzled comment.

The formatting of the spam messages (exclamation points and slashes at the beginning) was that of a Linux shell command, suggesting that a devout Gabenist may have been involved in this unprecedented outcry.

A Gabenist is "the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipresent, omnipresent ruler of PC gaming," and one who believes that Valve head Gabe Newell "created the universe long ago, purely from Steam. "F**king Urban Dictionary (opens in new tab).

The exclamation mark in "steamdeck" is supposedly intended to execute a specific command. However, the spammers missed the space they needed, so we don't know what good it did them.

The forward slash in /claim undoubtedly refers to its use in the root file pathname in the system. This implies that /claim is an absolute path (open in new tab) and that you can simply jump there by spamming it. Nice try.

The real joke is that nowhere in the official present rules does it say anything about the need to type the same command 5,000 times, let alone the need to type one word in chat.

Frankly, while it is nice to see people join together in hope, there were times when my entire screen was flooded with commands. I don't know if this was an example of crowd mentality or an organized hijacking, but one thing is for sure: for those watching online, the atmosphere at the game awards was filled with an unforgettable chaos.