Over a week ago, Werner Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, announced its new standalone video game news site, Glixel, set to launch in October.
The site promises to be “a lifeline for gamers.” But is more liberal game commentary really what gamers need? Haven’t Kotaku and Polygon already saturated the market for progressive identity politics in gaming journalism? Apparently not.
You may be asking, “How do you know Glixel’s liberal if it hasn’t launched yet?” Well, the site has yet to launch, but it’s weekly newsletter is already here—and it wears its political bent on its sleeve.
The newsletter features mostly stick to the apolitical. But there are some definite red flags.
The first letter featured an interview with the developer of Uncharted 4 where the interviewer asked the developer, apropos of nothing, how Anita Sarkeesian influenced his work. Sarkeesian is the navel-gazing feminist video game critic, who never played games until she decided to start nitpicking their perceived misogyny on YouTube. Her infectious brand of feminist criticism is echoed by writers throughout game journalism.
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This week’s issue, the second newsletter, features another red flag: an article ripping on the new game Revolution: Homefront, which is more or less an interactive Red Dawn — primarily on political grounds. And, unsurprisingly, the criticism is coming from the left.
Don’t get me wrong. Revolution is a lousy game, and the consensus of reviews reflect that. But the article doesn’t touch on the game’s mechanics, only its politics:
Like so many games, the plot is little more than permission to shoot a foreigner in the face and then high five Jefferson’s ghost. It’s as incoherent and unself-aware as the 1980s B-movie its cast resembles. You know the type: one where a death count in the mid-thousands is accrued as the righteous, one-man cost of dispensing freedom and justice from an ever-ejaculating gun-barrel. It’s Arnie’s jaw, lined with sweat and as taut as male sexual repression. It’s Chuck’s lumpen, god-fearing, Second Amendment beard. It’s Sly’s patriotically wrinkled, anti-intellectual headband, dripping pure, uncut testosterone down a naked cheerleader’s front. It’s the Trumpocalypse. It’s everything that will Make America Great Again.
Yep, it’s called a shooter. If you are unfamiliar with the genre, they are games where you tend to kill a lot of people with guns. And believe it or not, Trump doesn’t even like them.
Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2012
Glixel’s appointed head, Jon Davison, told The New York Times, “We want to make it very much about the people—not just the people that make games, but the people that play them.”
Hmmm, this line seems very familiar. In fact Polygon said the exact same thing when it launched. Polygon started with thoughtful long-form content about the game industry, but eventually a fair portion of Polygon’s content turned political, even going so far as giving games lower review scores for political reasons.
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Just watch this Polygon demo of a virtual-reality gun game. The guy in the video can’t demo the damn game because he’s too busy telling his sob story of how he’s scared of guns.
Why would they get someone who hates guns to review a gun game? As goes for Glixel, why would they have someone with liberal contempt for B-movie patriotism write about a Red Dawn rip-off? What happened to reviewing genre on its own terms?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a liberal-progressive take on video games. There’s apparently enough social justice-y types out there to make it profitable. But there’s just so damn much of it with no substantial mainstream counterweight.
You have sites like Kotaku churning out PC garbage on the reg, and even the larger IGN following suit. Any right-leaning take on gaming is relegated to small blogs and online forums.
The real problem with the political bias in game journalism is that their reviews get factored into Metacritic scores. Games might get dinged if there’s not enough minorities or if a title features an over-sexualized female character. Sarkeesian has actively encouraged gamers to use bad reviews as a way to change the habits of game developers. The majority of gamers, who just want to know if a game is fun and well made, are done a disservice by these types of reviews.
In a world where everything from unlockable character poses to the ability to competently play a game gets politicized, who is asking for more of this nonsense?
With Glixel in its prenatal state, it’s too early to tell if it will go the way of Polygon and Kotaku, but the early evidence is not promising. The liberal gaming press may just have to make some more room in the already crowded echo chamber.
Follow me on Twitter @William__Hicks.
