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.
Kotaku contributor Mattie Brice made it about race.
Feminist Frequency’s Jonathan McIntosh decried the industry’s “fetishization” of gun culture.
Jed Whitaker of Destructoid echoed the sentiment.
Indie game developer Jonathan Blow blamed games for making mass murder cool.
Moviebob wants E3, gaming’s biggest expo, to change their programming.
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.
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.