Okay, at risk of adding fuel to fire, here’s my genuine, non-subtweet take on the escapist relaunching with the goal of “leaving politics at the door.”
One of the realizations this little corner of the world has had to make in the last few years is that cultural work is always carries some politics. I don’t mean lower case p, democrat-v-republic politics, I mean a capital P Politics about how we imagine our ideal world and lives
This realization has complicated the job of reporting on and critiquing games: suddenly, we recognize that old “common sense” techniques, angles, and story selection carry bias we’d ignored. And many of us have reacted to this in with a rush of creativity.
In the wake of mass shootings, we’re talking again about the depiction of gun violence in games. In the wake of harassment campaigns, we’re paying more attention to how marginalized folks are treated.
In the wake of revelations about work conditions, more reporting has been done about the state of labor conditions in gaming. And all the while, across editorial and video content, games criticism has transformed and grown in amazing, exciting ways.
I mean this sincerely: Waypoint’s competition knocks it out the park every single week. Every major site is turning out work that is voice-y and powerful and unique every single work week. (Maybe every day, but I largely catch up on weekends now.)
And here’s the thing, much of that work emerges from the realization that there is no sideline to sit on. Realizing that your work carries a politics is freeing. Once you know the words you write have this second set of meanings, you can write with those in mind.
You can take what would be a stock preview and recognize your own biases in it, and look to challenge those. OR you can say okay, let me lift those from subtext into text proper. That’s such an incredible feeling, and does work for the reader too.
Starting at “everything is Political” isn’t a move away from fun. It’s a complication of fun that can lift the work you and your coworkers do. As an editor, that’s the best I can ever hope for.
TL;DR: I think we’ve smartly learned that you CAN’T leave politics at the door, and have used that knowledge to evaluate our own work and push it in new exciting directions.
