This may seem conspiratorial and I know gamer chuds will be gamer chudding, but I’m thinking particularly about The Last of Us II and Grand Theft Auto 6. Muh feminazis are ruining muh games, gamergate etc. Abby being the focal point of transphobic and misogynistic jabs, and GTA 6 going “woke” by including a new female playable character. Hear me out: similarly to how the feds love stoking “culture war” tensions and issues to distract from and defang revolutionary movements, unionizing, etc. the misogynistic, racist and transphobic reaction to modern gaming does a hell of a job from distracting left-leaning people from talking about issues like crunch and overwork in games development, sexual harassment and assault in the industry, and more insidious messaging within games themselves – The Last of Us II is thinly veiled Zionist apologia for instance. Leftist media criticism becomes hyperfocused on countering braindead chud arguments rather than on tackling systemic issues within the industry as well as the pro-corporate, pro-military, pro-violence and pro-police themes of many games.

This is not to say that fighting the big -phobias and -isms is not important, it absolutely is. It just seems quite fortuitous for industry “leaders” that leftist critics are preoccupied with dealing with nonsense chuddery. There may be some corporate subterfuge going on, too. GTA 6 had a big data leak that showed pre-alpha footage from the game, and gamers round the web began making absolutely ignorant comments about how “shit” it looks, how poor it seems to run, and nit-picking really dumb stuff. On my mind because Stephanie Sterling dropped a vid on it very recently, and when she was reading off some of the reddit posts bad-mouthing the pre-alpha footage it just read as so absolutely shallow, so grotesquely robotic, that the bot detecting hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Rockstar’s competitors could benefit from people dismissing their new game before it even drops because it “looks like shit”, is what I’m saying.

Like I said, maybe conspiratorial nonsense on my part. Gamers are gamers after all. Something about gamer outrage just feels so plastic and artificial especially recently that I’m not sure how to feel about it.