In the wake of a grisly shooting, people will no doubt be looking for things to blame. While you would expect an out-of-touch septuagenarian politician to blame video games, you would not expect it out of the gaming press.
But Polygon’s editor-at-large wrote this tweet.
![Polygon writer going full Polygon during Orlando shooting. [Ethics]](https://i.imgur.com/R4r4AZ1.png)
Kotaku contributor Mattie Brice made it about race.
after mass shooting on queer brown people the game industry unites to talk about games where white men shoot, kill, and exploit for pleasure
— Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) June 12, 2016
Feminist Frequency’s Jonathan McIntosh decried the industry’s “fetishization” of gun culture.
I was going to live-tweet E3 press events today but I just don’t think I can stomach the way the video game industry fetishizes gun culture.
— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) June 12, 2016
The question is not “Do games make people killers?” Nope. The real question is “How do games that fetishize guns contribute to gun culture?"
— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) June 12, 2016
Jed Whitaker of Destructoid echoed the sentiment.
It is hard to think about anything after the shootings in Orlando.
Not looking forward to seeing all these games that glorify guns at #E3
— Sexy Jed Whitaker (@Jed05) June 12, 2016
Indie game developer Jonathan Blow blamed games for making mass murder cool.
The lesson of E3: Game studios are working very hard to build fantasies about how cool it is to be a mass murderer.
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) June 13, 2016
Look folks, I am not saying anything about video games causing violence or not.
— Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow) June 13, 2016
Moviebob wants E3, gaming’s biggest expo, to change their programming.
E3 exhibitors: NOW probly a good time to go through your shooter presentations and ask "is any of this going to feel in poor taste?"
— Bob Chipman (@the_moviebob) June 12, 2016
Christ Plante, Polygon co-founder and senior editor at Vox-owned The Verge, wrote an article with managing editor T.C. Sottek wrote an article chastising E3 presenters like EA for promoting gun culture. They even implied gun games should delay their release dates as a response to the tragedy—just like an earthquake motocross game was held back after the 2011 Japan earthquake.
But games with guns makes up a huge portion of the industry. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put the breaks on dozens of releases that include guns but don’t have content related to mass civilian shootings.
Sottek even used the tragedy to take a cheap shot at Gamergate for discussing Reddit’s censorship of Orlando shooting discussion.
an observation:
the gamergate subreddit and the trump subreddit are competing to pin this on Islam pic.twitter.com/ishOZQAKmT
— tc (@chillmage) June 12, 2016
There is no evidence that the shooter in Orlando was a fan of violent video games—so far, radical Islam and homophobia are the two leading explanations for the shooter’s motivations—and yet there seems to be widespread condemnation of the industry from the gaming press.
For decades, following the Columbine massacre in 1999, the narrative has been that video games cause real-world violence. Now it seems the problem has shifted to “promoting gun culture,” a distinction many will have a hard time parsing.
Follow me on Twitter @William__Hicks.
