It's even worse. The whole journalistic side of it is just a giant paid ad over and over again. There's no real critique of games being done by these outlets that pretend to do it. It sucks seeing the whole medium being treated as just a product and never as art.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Yeah I dont understand how games journalism is so bad specifically. It's so infuriating trying to find out about something only for an article to waffle on about nothing for 5 pages
True of other artistic mediums as well. Everyone wants their hobby to be "art" but nobody wants to actually engage critically with anything which they consume. For most people, film, literature and music are sources of cheap dopamine hits, and the artistic output of the twenty-first century shows it.
When I think of art, I think of rich aristocrat dumbasses trading ugly pictures. The word is completely poisoned for me.
yes, the word art (word art lol) maybe is so poisoned right now.
i think that videogames are just like movies, cinema is art, but not all the movies are art. that's why we have a subgenre that it calls "art cinema" so, i think that is the same in videogames, there's some games that maybe we can call "art videogames" but also we have mario kart.
Ugh gamer culture is the worst. Idk how the fun thing i used to do as a kid sometimes turned into one of the most toxic parts of modern society.
Anything mainstream is going to have toxicity as a major feature, that's the price paid to become mainstream in a culture that lionizes capitalism. That doesn't mean everything niche is non-toxic, of course, but in general, everything that is mostly non-toxic is also niche.
I think it's more than that. I think the gaming industry as a whole caters to the loudest and most obnoxious minority. Lots of people enjoy video games, yet so many of them cater to 20-40 year old man babys. They put ridiculously sexualized depictions of women in their games, take little online communities throwing fits seriously, make their games simpler, and less engaging so people don't have to think while playing them, etc.
I think they are under the impression this makes them more money, but i honestly think it hurts them. There are plenty of games that could have been good, and i might have tried had they focused more on good mechanics and gameplay and less on things like crazy detailed graphics, big boobies, and other nonsense. I can't imagine im the only one who is just put off of the industry entirely by this stuff.
People got addicted and then got precious over it. Brings out toxic behaviour in a lot of folks.
Gamergate
There has been pushback against rightwing attitudes in gamer culture lately.
Games as art largely got killed by capitalism. There's some of it in indie, as with other industries, but they turned into a largely casino-adjacent medium overall. As for game enjoyers, yeah there are a lot of people who get defensive over criticism levied at the game(s) they like. In general, any online "community" centered around a product seems to trend toward being cult-like (or cult-lite, perhaps), maybe because in the capitalist west (particularly the US section of things) the customer has virtually no power or influence short of kicking up a prolonged media shitstorm for a given company and just kinda has to deal with what is meted out or leave, so it's maybe similar to the makeup of a cult in that way; supreme leader (corporation) and followers (customers who stick around). And also the disconnect, that with online, we aren't generally talking about a business made up of people you know in your community, but instead a largely faceless entity who hardly knows your in-person region exists, much less cares.
Would love an Anti-Gamer-Aktion community, but it would just end up being SRS 2.
It's pretty much a given that a plurality, if not majority, of videogame fans, especially online, are immensely obsessive and defensive of their treats, while also being massive chuddy manchildren that seem the most susceptible to culture war freak outs.
Good Post!
What always gets me is that they can't admit and accept that something is overpriced, low quality shit when it is just overpriced, low quality shit. Instead they huff the copium and call anyone who does offer genuine criticism a "toxic hater" or whatever. Another argument I also keep seeing is "It's just not for you".