Quite frankly, I don't think you'll find many examples quite as bad as the second one on this forum. Yes, tempers get heated occasionally, on subjects we are passionate about (usually DRM, Steam, LucasArts and EA), but people rarely resort to the kind of "13-year-old-who-can't-spell-but-thinks-he's-a-l33t-haX0r" rhetoric, that you put forward there. And if pressed, most members here will give long and eloquent arguments about precisely what it is about a subject that they find aggravating.
And while I agree with you that the first of the two examples is certainly a more pleasant contribution to a discussion, I do not agree that the poster of the second example would necessarily see his own opinion as objective fact.

I started to use Action 52 instead of Bioshock, but I thought that might be loading my point too much :p
It does depend on the delivery, I suppose, but I've never taken even the most blunt statement of superiority ("SS2 is just plain better in every way. Period.") to be intended as fact, and I've never seen a person who makes a comment like that refuse to qualify it as an opinion when pressed on the point. I agree with what you're saying in principle, but I can't really see how it applies in practical terms - I've never seen anyone who gave the impression of thinking in the manner that you're describing, at least not on this particular subject.
But this is just my experience, and somebody once told me "As much as you dislike people, you still give them too much credit."

Not on THIS forum. But go check out some other gaming forums (cough GameSpot cough), and you'll see that kind of crap in almost every single thread.
EDIT: To be fair, that could have something to do with the relative population of 13-year-old leet haxors on those forums compared to this one.

That's not elitism - that's arrogance, and poor critical thinking and/or communication skills.
e⋅lit⋅ism [i-lee-tiz-uhm, ey-lee-] –noun
1. practice of or belief in rule by an elite.
2. consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.
(elitist. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/elitist (accessed: July 06, 2009).)
By my understanding, an elitist gamer would be one who has a very keen ability to understand, analyse and/or play games, and is aware that they are part of a very small group of people who possess this skill.
Broadly speaking, this definition should cover most people here :)
If anything, an elitist gamer should be more able to describe, and support their opinions than the average person*.
(*) I'd say the average forum user, but that's setting the bar a bit too low.

I strongly agree on that point. First times I read some topics here, I was thinking "oh no, another thread ruled by I-know-all-on-all-nerds..."
I was really disappointed, because I was thinking that thread about good old games would be more mature, more open-minded, more "classy" (to quote GOG).
But in the end, well, it's just another thread like every other ones. Fun place, with some irritating users, but still fun place.
Don't take it to seriously and you might like this place, if it's not already the case.

Oops. I didn't intend to convey THAT... My complaint doesn't focus on any particular forum. It's just a feeling I get after reading various threads in various places.
Honestly? I was thinking a little about Fallout 1/2 vs. Fallout 3 debates after visiting the Fallout board on GOG. That got me thinking back to the summer of E3 2008, when Fallout 3 hadn't been released yet and I spent a lot of time on the Bethesda Softworks forums trying to learn more about it. Tensions were riding high in those days, and the constant clash of close-minded people resonated through every thread. It was worse on No Mutants Allowed; the majority opinion of the game was negative, there, and this negativity seemed to feed on itself until it almost appeared that the NMA forumites were having a contest to see who could dump the most crap on Fallout 3.
Somewhere in the midst of those musings, I decided to make this thread. Sometimes I do suffer from delusions of being the only sane person in a world of lunatics, but I generally snap out of it fast enough.
This is the definition of "Elitism" I was going for. "Elitist" in the sense of being proud of your place as gamer who is better than other gamers because of your selective taste.

Dictionary definitions of words considered pejorative rarely carry the pejorative meaning. You almost make "elitist" sound like a good thing. ;-)

Funny. This reminds me of the "flavor of the month" (FOTM) phenomenon on many boards, except the opposite. If something is the FOTM, saying anything bad about it (even if it's true) will cause flames. If something is the anti-FOTM, saying anything good about it (even if it's true) will cause flames. I like to hope we're more mature than that around here. :p

Ah well, you might have mentioned that at some point ;-)
Oh, I think we all feel like that a lot of the time. Especially on the internet. This forum, however, is where I go to find a much higher percentage of sane, intelligent people than in most other places.

ohh you read one of my threads?
As to the actual topic of this discussion: Games are fun to me, they're generally meant to be fun and any significant interruption in fun pretty much stops me playing the game.
Thats not to say it's all happy smiles and laughs, some of the most fun I've had in games has come from the cathartic exercise of my darker emotions. I've had genuine sadness (Grim Fandango & GTA4 being the most notable), genuine anger (GTA4 again) and several other manifestations of cruelty from the mundane of shooting the bucket on top of the church scaffold in Mafia and having it land on the head of the worker below to the darker stuff in games like Manhunt.
The point where the challenge in a game stops being about overcoming an obstacle and instead becomes just getting the motivation to play the game is normally where I stop playing. Manhunt is a good example of this, I was enjoying the stealth & murder aspects of it for a while but by the time I got to the zoo level, the novelty of the executions had worn off, the clumsy stealth mechanic and repetitive nature of the 'knock, hide, murder, repeat' gameplay had kicked in and there wasn't a story to hold me there so I stopped playing.
I'm willing to put up with a dodgy experience if the underlying concept is good. I finished Operation Flashpoint more times that I can remember and thats one of the buggiest games I've ever encountered, exacerbated rather than improved by patches. In fact a running joke on the official codemasters OFP forum at the time involved getting the latest patch to see the newest and greatest bugs. Now OFP I loved, it had a good core concept, reasonable if somewhat intermittent execution, amazing ambition, a fair story and well made missions. By contrast, I lasted about 6-7 missions into ARMA and uninstalled it. The missions were just utter shit, when I have PERSONALLY made better missions for OFP than about half the ones I saw in ARMA (and I'd far from a good mission maker), then that was the point where I realised I'd never have fun with the game and so the bugs wouldn't be minor annoyances but disc snapping rage magnets. The mission I was on when I stopped featured a sniper team, you were the only shooter, your backup waited in the car rather than actually backing you up and you had to take out 3 trucks worth of men, alone...
I've wasted far too much of my life on experiences that I really didn't enjoy. I was one of the millions duped into buying Final Fantasy 7 for the PS1, I played it for a while and thought the combat was shit and the rest of the gameplay wasn't much better. The only reason I played as long as I did was because I was searching for this magnificent story that I kept being told was there. After a few weeks I realised that everyone was talking about the 2 text boxes that "conversations" came in when you walked up to random people on the street and pressed X. To this day I can only assume it became so heralded as a story driven opus because the reviewers were used to games on the NES where you only got ONE text box and the sheer innovative scope of more than one had blown their minds.
I do know a pair of genuine PC elitists though, the kind to which you suggest consoles as a viable gaming option with titles they might enjoy and they look at you as if you've just taken a shit in their grandmother's mouth. One is a hardcore sim & tactics obsessive who has a high spec gaming rig and pushes it to limits that consoles can't manage. He's also got a pointless bias against 3rd person games but to each their own, for the most part consoles don't hold much to interest him but he's unwilling to try them anyway. The other is frankly just annoying, he gets me to build a decent specced PC for him every few years and then mostly just plays flash games & dwarf fortress.
I'm here as well
Also: Holy shit, wall of text!

Well, I don't know if I'd be considered an elitist or not, but know I *only* play a game if I find fun.
And if a game isn't fun, I try and figure out what about it wasn't fun, and more importantly *why* it wasn't fun, and then I try to deal out as much criticism as the game/developers/publishers honestly deserve based on that discovery. I really can't do any less.
Without criticism there is no progress.
EDIT: *high-fives Aliasalpha*

Yeah well, it was late, and I was headed for bed at the time. Otherwise, I would have added "as well as INsane, but still intelligent, people" ;-)

You forgot to mention pretty

I think we've established that your avatar is NOT you ;-p

Aye, unlike certain places on the Interweb, that shall not be named here since some are somewhat tied to GOG