There Are Ethical Concerns in Gaming, but Progressive Opinions Aren't One of Them

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Leigh Alexander has written a lot about games over the years. A lot. She's written everything from everyday bland news posts to personal essays that will rip your figurative guts out. In August, she wrote about how the "Gamer" label is fading from relevance. She noted that as more people incorporate games into their lives, an identity created essentially by abrasive and exclusionary marketing practices is starting to be shrugged off by a community that's outgrowing it. Naturally, an angry mob of gamers (who will go on and on about how much they're against censorship, if you ask) interpreted this as an attack on their very existence. They contacted companies sponsoring the site where she wrote that piece, convincing Intel to pull their ads -- presumably because no one in Intel's marketing department was willing to Google the issue for five fucking seconds to form their own conclusions.

Those railing against journalists and writers like this say that they're championing ethical concerns in gaming and games journalism. But Alexander knows what those ethical concerns within the industry really are, and surprisingly they don't look a thing like what the mob is going after. Today she shared a partial list of real ethical concerns in the world of gaming, and it's well worth adding to your weekend reading. It's a lot of things that others have been thinking, tweeting, and wrestling with over the past two months in particular, but that Alexander lays bare in the clearest way possible.

I'm not even going to spoil it here. Just roll up your sleeves and dive in.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Some people are just hostile, sometimes violently so, to the concept that there is ANY ethical dimension to ANY business beyond that embodied by unfettered market forces.

Look at "ag gag" laws. Crafted by shady groups like ALEC, they're designed exclusively and explicitly to protect corporate criminals against exposure for their crimes. When you hear the rhetoric used to justify such laws, there are eerie similarities to the rhetoric being employed to silence critics of the game industry.

Take a broader view. The instigators of these trends are very sloppy at wiping off their fingerprints, when they bother at all.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Society is turning away from the unfettered capitalism of libertarians and the hate-bias of conservatives, and towards progressive or liberal ideals.

Global 'first world' society is already there. American Society is somewhat fighting it out with joining the modern world or the medieval one: but this is an 'extinction gasp' sort of battle - libertarian and conservative ideals speak to an older generation. The 1960s meme of "never trust anyone over 30" - that generation gap they had... is coming back to us in the form of millennials versus everyone else.

Things like #gamergate represent the frustration the older generation is having with its younger peers, in broad demographic terms, no longer being hate-mongers, and no longer falling for the corporate-dream of unfettered libertarian greed.

We're in for a whole lot of nasty fights like this... until most of us are dead, and our kids have taken over.

[Miranda Priestly]

@Pussycat:

You are a victim of liberal media bias and living in an information bubble. It's typical of those with your mindset and yet you have the audacity to call others close minded. Being surrounded by those who think like you do 24/7 and only taking in news that bolsters your point of view is not progressive-ism, it's pure foolishness and far too common in this day and age.

You somehow think that the younger generation is going to capitulate to this idea of socialism in progressive clothing,of working their whole lives to give it away to someone else. I frankly think you are going to be sorely disappointed. You really need educate yourself on the trends of millennials-or the ipod generation as I call them, and how they are viewing this current situation with our country and those running it.

Idealism works only on paper and in the brains of the disconnected. Anyone who is against anyone's individual rights cannot be a person who champions people in any form. Libertarianism is about a person's free will to do as they see fit with their own lives. It is a natural human right. That's all.

[Pussycat Catnap]

@Miranda:

Given how much you've expanded what I said into other random directions - I think you need to look in a mirror on some of that 'bubble' and 'close minded' talk.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but there are few liasons so fraught and unstable as that of theocratic religious conservatives, anarchistic neo-libertarians, and corporate plutocrats. The only way to hold such an unholy alliance together is by the constant fabrication of a string of imaginary threats ("look! A socialist!") so dire and menacing that the only chance for survival is to band together under whichever banner the devious leaders are flying this week.

That's why right-wing rhetoric is so incredibly vicious and hateful. It has to be. If they let up on the demonization of the evil liberals, the masses might discover that each subgroup of their coalition has just as much or more in common with liberal ideals as it does with the other factions.

And without that visceral animosity, the status quo shifts unpredictably beneath both the establishment parties. That's a prospect that none of the power brokers wants to see.

[Ciaran Laval]

@Miranda Priestly there are left and right libertarians and they don't all have the same world view, far from it.

As for the Liberal media bias that's certainly not the way in the UK where the media is biased towards right wing ideology.