“Keep Politics Out of Gaming” – Why Games Journalists Won’t Leave Their Ideologies at the Door

[binary solo]

badgenome said:

I mostly agree, but the kicker here is this: As long as your opinions aren’t actively harming people, they’ll always be welcome in gamer culture.

A lot of these self-styled cultural critics have a tendency to tag any opinion they find disagreeable as "harmful" or "problematic", and rather than address the point, they seek to make them beyond the pale. And just as a lot of the Gamergaters conflate bias with corruption, the author and his ideological allies seem to conflate caustic verbal disagreement with actual harassment.

But generally, yes, it would be better if gamers who are sick of being lectured to about the evils of privilege by a bunch of, well, hilariously privileged people would express their disgust by taking their eyeballs and page clicks elsewhere instead of trying to eradicate the ineradicable. That would seem to be a market based solution to this problem.

Well let's be even handed here. The people who oppose the cultural critics also tag any opinion they find to be disagreeable as harmful and problematic. If they didn't find these things harmful some of them wouldn't be anywhere near so vitriolic in their reaction. And indeed the vitriol being spewed from is by degrees worse coming (from what I've read) from the anti-SJWs (for want of a better term). So in actual fact no one's opinion is welcome in gamer culture unless you are sitting in your own ideological echo chamber. But that is the entirety of our social and political discourse, so gamer culture pretty much reflects our broader socio-political culture vis-a-vis intolerance towards people who have different ideas about the way things should be.