Ex-Kotaku staff go independent and launch Aftermath
aftermath.site
aftermath.site
This is the same thing that drove me nuts about "gamergate". It's like talking about how bad it is that the paint is peeling while the whole house is on fire.
I'll admit I do miss the older generation of video game 'journalism' nonetheless. Had its problems, but the thing is, it did feel like people were sharing their genuine and honest opinions as a capital-G "Gamer" more often. It became mostly known for the stereotypical attitudes that people have since come to dislike, which you can see manifested sometimes e.g. in old Penny Arcade comics. The only irony is that it feels like somehow, people's more progressive attitudes manage to have even less nuance than the older "unrefined" opinions that have since been walked back on by many. You can see this especially in the bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games-I'm not really sure how a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance in such a short period, but I'll be damned, they really managed to do it.
What happened in this time period, though, is interesting. There's really no such concept as a "capital-G Gamer" in a society where pretty much any kind of person plays video games to at least some degree. There's still a spectrum of different kinds and different levels of dedication, but the lines are firmly blurred. Gaming is just another thing that people do, on computers, phones, whatever, wherever.
To me, the modern era though, won't actually be colored by how gaming went mainstream, or by any event involving gaming at all. It'll be about how everyone became phony and full of shit with pandering to trends and moral grandstanding. I'd be willing to place a wager on that one. Unfortunately, that isn't specific to gaming, gaming journalism, or any kind of journalism.
In my youth I read a few PC game magazines. Not sure about the accuracy of the reviews but the people writing them did try to make their reviews as entertaining as possible with jokes and what not.
Sadly, those old magazines are long gone so I can't really go back and re-read them to see if it's just rose-tinted glasses. I don't even remember the magazine name or which country it was from.
Edit: Come to think of it, those reviewers were kind of like Yahtzee (formerly*) of Zero Punctuation fame.
* https://twitter.com/YahtzeeCroshaw/status/172168721254128042...
It's important to recognize that the stakes were lower back then. When games cost hundreds of millions to develop and market and are expected to have revenue in the billions bad reviews have the potential to have a massive impact on that revenue.
> You can see this especially in the bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games-I'm not really sure how a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance in such a short period, but I'll be damned, they really managed to do it.
I don't know if I agree. If you look at the most profitable gaming sector - mobile gacha games - some of these games are extremely "horny". But there's also another elephant in the room here that has nothing to do with games journalism: China. I think a lot of content in popular games is toned down so it doesn't run afoul of Chinese regulators. There are examples online[1] of it being done retroactively, but if a game is being developed from day one with the Chinese market in mind, you would never know what was cut to make that happen.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/49x7m0/chinese_wow_cen...
Oh I'm not arguing horny games don't exist or can't be popular. That's the thing with being dishonest with yourself and maybe with regressive attitudes towards sex in general: it's not that people are any different biologically than they used to be, it's just the social climate that people are living in. People will happily parrot on about how everyone is "pornsick" nowadays and then open an incognito window right after. I've experienced the whiplash of witnessing people like this personally. I'm sure it's not literally everyone... but I think in general it's underestimated just how two-faced the average person will happily be.
I don't really know a ton about gacha games, but players of gacha games have certainly developed a ... reputation on the Internet, and media coverage of this has not been very kind either. If social norms hadn't been shifting so much, I'd imagine that micro-transactions and a cutesy art style would be the things people lambaste the most about games like Genshin Impact and their playerbases. Instead, it has taken an oddly dark turn.
In 2023 I can play mainstream "AAA" games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. These games have non-trivial systems designed to gamify human sexual behavior, including such features as "configure your genitalia" during character creation and choose-your-own-adventure-style romantic coupling complete with nudity, intercourse and full voice acting. I would guess that these games would have been banned or classified as pornography for being too sexually explicit if they were released when I was growing up (90s kid).
If anything, the trend I've noticed over time is a reduction in the conspicuous objectification of women in mainstream game titles. But even still: there seems to be an ever-longer-tail of borderline-pornographic content entering mass-market outlets like Steam.
All of this just to say: I don't think "sexually repressed" is how I would describe the relationship people have with games in 2023. Then again, I never found Lara Croft's outsized, rectangular bosom to add much to the story.
Of course, I am not asking for a return to the pathetic days of Lara Crofts' chest. I get that this is one of the most iconic things people think of, but it's neither appealing to me nor something I think was "good". I think if developers want to do that sort of thing because they want to, well, go for it, but it's probably going to come off as stupid.
In order to understand what I'm talking about, I think you'd have to directly confront the perception of media as seen through the lens of younger people on TikTok and Twitter. Personally, I have abandoned social media of any kind (unless you count traditional forums like this, and a few chats), but the way things were trending with regards to how people treated things could not be described as anything but regressive, full-stop.
And also, there's a bit more nuance to the situation than just sexualization itself. I think to illustrate the kind of distinction I'm talking about, I'll just link to someone who writes better than I do.
https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
(This is of course, not about video games. However, I do personally believe that this is in fact a general trend, and not specific to video games or movies.)
> a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance
To the contrary, I find that there is more sex - including a greater variety in the expression of human sexuality - in mainstream video game titles than I can ever remember there being in my lifetime. Surely a lot of people are paying money for these video games, or else they would not be produced.
Edit: fixed redundant phrasing.
Absolutely. It is important for me to be clear that I do not believe video games are significantly less sexual overall.
I do think, however, that people's treatment of sexuality in media is dramatically different, and the amount of criticism and scrutiny that it receives outpaces most other social issues these days. This has led to at least a little bit of a chilling effect, as if you're a game developer, or anyone else producing media, you probably feel the pressure to be a lot more careful about exactly how you handle sexuality, as things have gotten a lot more cutthroat overall. That's not to say every consequence of this has been unilaterally bad, but I do personally believe that this leads to things that overall feel less authentic in a lot of cases. Personally, I like to see people's personal creative visions, uncompromised by concerns of how it will be perceived.
But socially and in media coverage, I do see what I personally would consider regressive. It feels like socially, the safest thing you can do is merely tolerate the existence of sexual content, and outwardly enjoying it can earn you some scrutiny. For example, A good amount of the NoFap crowd paints pretty much anyone who enjoys pornographic content as being pornsick. In addition to just them, there is a serious amount of scrutiny regarding the nature of sexual content, and there is a lot of pressure to be careful about how you openly enjoy things; the safest place to be is to merely tolerate sexuality rather than embrace it. If you do embrace it, you can count on it being scrutinized. If something you enjoy is considered problematic, such as a relationship with a power dynamic issue, it will be scrutinized-it doesn't matter that there's media like Game of Thrones filled to the brim with incest and other such content. (In fact, Game of Thrones has become almost cliche to bring up, not unlike Grand Theft Auto with regards to video game violence.)
I can see why my position seems startlingly inaccurate from some perspectives. That said, I do think there is something regressive going on, even if describing it as "puritanical" is perhaps a misstep, as it is clearly a lot more nuanced than that.
My favorite thing to point at to illustrate my own take is the utter corporate sterility of Meta's "Horizon" social vision compared to the untamed (and often sexually-charged) landscape of spaces like Second Life and VRChat. There is a clear mismatch here: open-ended channels show us the forms of creative expression that the human psyche is drawn towards when given a blank canvas. Meanwhile, Meta reduces creativity down to something that the corporate hegemony considers "brand safe." You can be whatever you want to be on Meta's platform, so long as it is an anatomically correct human who aligns with a handful of well-defined social archetypes (all vetted by committee to be a representative cross-section of the diversity of humanity dontchaknow).
Even if I don't agree with your specific claims, this at least seems to rhyme with some what you're observing here.
There's a certain amount of "puriteen" pushback, but BG3 has done extremely well out of it without a backlash. The trick was to do something other than the same old exploitation.
The best approach I've found is to become aware of who are writing the reviews I perceive as high quality and simply follow them when they change medias and pay attention to what they communicate about their current position.
Ultimately, the best reviews are almost always coming from sources that have a business model that doesn't rely on ads.
Because this score is in relation to the whole market, not just the reviewed games. Journalists only review the promising games, which means usually from established studios, or from unknown developers when they received some positive feedback from the community. But as it's their job, they still see the whole market, they know how low the bottom, and how high the ceiling is.
In general the whole scale of scores for games is shifted upwards: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/eu63f/modern_gaming...
Heh I’m not sure. I’ve been following the drama around CA and total war recently and the company seems to have set to do exactly that. Pump out mediocre recycled crap as long as people keep buying it. Except this time it’s blown up on them.
Sure, insider access to studios and pre-release games is important to media, but that’s… also the same for movies and books and TV and music publications? And the argument about the scoring is so old and trite. There are so many games coming out nowadays that the bad ones just don’t get the time of the day. Does median score on Pitchfork hover around 5?
But even apart from that, written reviews aren’t the big traffic drivers they used to be. Bits of gameplay narrated by staff, guides, walkthroughs etc, and other commentary are only increasing in how much they matter traffic-wise.
The truth is that for the most part (with notable exceptions) people on both sides of the divide are adults, and nobody is going to blacklist a website because they didn’t like a negative review.
Publishers also generally do not get to influence review scores, the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot and subsequent exodus of editorial staff is still An Event that everyone remembers and knows about.
The way I see it today, ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities that is what reaches the front page. It's fucking bizarre but it makes sense when the goal is to reach as many people as possible. On both sides of politics it's just rage bait depending on which way the needle swings. Rage bait creates the clicks that brings the mass appeal not just "nerdy gamers."
I'm a nerdy gamer. I just want to know how good of a game stuff is. When you go to actual niche forums you find real information without the bullshit. You aren't going to find that at all on mainstream mass media sites like the Verge, Motherboard/Vice, Kotaku, et al. I think the goal of aftermath is to just create another mainstream outlet. I hope they prove me wrong.
I have a suspicion that the only way such content has any value today in a world with quick and easy access to online video is that they are given copies prior to the release of the game. They get clicks because of peoples impatience to learn more despite being able to see effectively infinite amount of content as soon as a game is officially released.
But the problem here is that game reviewers livelihood is entirely dependent on getting early access and if they don't speak highly of the game then their livelihood can be cut off. They are basically all bribed into giving positive feedback. I think it is actually worse than nothing at all. It is actively harmful to finding out what a game is actually like.
I guess my point is that we should just wait until a game is released. There are infinite copies and there exists more games than anyone could ever play. Reading some heavily biased opinions about a video game a week before it comes out is not meaningful.
Are you really willing to watch 10+ hours of footage, just to figure out the worth of a game? Because that's the actual worth of a review, telling you not just about the game itself, but also how well it continues after the initial tutorial-phase.
I'd consider someones review if they bought the game themselves, they don't generate any revenue from it and we have had similar taste in the past. Even the most brief word of mouth praise of something from a friend is going to be more valuable than any length review from a biased source. It might also be possible to find a collection of random people on Steam to follow just for their reviews. I've never tried this, but I think it would abide by my guidelines of trustworthiness.
You could also use a review aggregator if you just want to see what the overall consensus is: https://opencritic.com/
My other advice which has worked very well as a PC Gamer is to look up Steam reviews, there are a LOT of underappreciated games that were poorly received by critics but players actually enjoyed. It is also review bomb resistant since you actually need to buy the game,will allow you to filter out by time periods, and notify you if there have been a noticeable change in review patterns.
I miss the sh*t out of printed specialist journalism. Growing up, we had a couple of printed magazines. You could tell they were incredibly well written, with great reviews, walkthroughs, interviews with people in the local industry, as well as surprisingly in-depth exposes about things like for example, how CG animations are made etc.
Unfortunately, thanks to a leaky water pipe, I can only cherish the memory of said collection.
Their business model was exchanging product (the magazine) for money. Based on that business model, they could pay their employees, a couple of passionate and talented people a living wage. something that I'm not sure modern internet-based outfits accomplish.
This seems like a pretty heavy exaggeration to me. I just spotchecked several reviews on IGN, PCGamer, and GamesRadar (top 3 sites I get when googling "games reviews"), and found nothing of the sort. I'm sure if you go digging you could find that content somewhere on the site, but to claim it's the crux of their review model is just false.
For example, the new MW3 is a game where there's lots you could comment on in terms of the ideology of their portrayals of the war on terror and "ends justify the means"... but not one of the mainstream reviews I can see spends time on it, other than to mention the villain's vague motives. Or on the flip side, take Fae Farm, a game that explicitly advertises itself as inclusive - only one paragraph of GamesRadar's the nine page review is on the topic of inclusivity, and it doesn't go any ideologically deeper than "there's a lot of customization here, including androgynous options and things like dreadlocks and turbans". The entire rest of the review is about gameplay and graphics.
The first name in that list is a guy who gave great reviews of a game by a developer who was sleeping with him.
Of course, due to one (or both? I forget which) of them being married, of course that fact had to be a secret.
In any other publication, the author's sexual liasons with the subject of the piece is considered a clear conflict of interest. Not so in gaming, it appeared.
I don't think I've ever read an article on Kotaku, I never read any games news and barely even play them anymore other than occasional Doom Eternal to blow off steam. But I know Grayson and Quinn's names because of how widely and loudly this argument getting disproved was.
I'm honestly kind of amazed to see someone still claiming this. Like I'm back editing more stuff into this because my brain is so confused and still thinking about it.
The top screenshot comes from DQ, and the post lists it as a "standout".
Thanks for pointing that out.
This site is just another in a long list of game journalism sites that is worthless.
It may be wrong, or right, but that is the narrative in my head around this. So it's probably the same in a lot of other disgruntled peoples' minds.
They write like this because it’s how anyone writes on a topic about which they have no experience. If you embed me as a wartime reporter, I’ll talk about the weird food and noise, not what most people reading the article want to read about.
And identifying a profitable market segment, inserting yourself as a critical member, and blaming doing a poor job on vague concepts of gatekeeping and bias seems like a good enough way to make a living that they keep trying at it
The political commentary starts a paragraph after the summary box. Huge article and maybne two paragraphs fit the bill. The anti-capitalism stuff always makes me roll my eyes, but it's a game review, just ignore the parts you don't care about.
2. What separates someone simply having beliefs that inform their lives from them having a political agenda? And where did you ever get the idea that politics is this thing that lives in a bubble, so innocuous as for its effects to be separable from our lives, such that we all have agreed to conduct our lives and careers without mentioning anything related to that bubble? Is it possible you see political ideas you agree with throughout each day and don't find them to be an agenda because they don't make you uncomfortable?
Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)
Leading up to that fiasco people were already frustrated with game media for being in bed with game publishers. And no, I don't care if they have a right to sleep together, I care that the journalistic integrity was so missing they couldn't be bothered to have someone else write the piece or be open about it. And then the entire war on gamers as misogynists for wanting game journalists to have some integrity.
I've never even opened their website since.
You used to find passionate and hungry writers with something to say. Then it became bitter and jaded misanthropes that don't recognize they're misanthropes. They tried to keep an alt-media rebellious tone, but warped it into tired boomer-splaining.
A tragedy really. I had to admit it was over when someone argued an opinion I already agreed with and they were still pissing me off.
You and I have very different memories about what "passionate articles from gamers" were about in the 90s and 00s.
Either way we slice it, we'll all soon see what is what brings people to certain publications? The brand? Long form, high research articles that just take too much research? The wokeness/andti-wokeness posturing? Is it a matter of just a few extremely talented people, carrying a publication?
We all can make our guesses, but the market will say who is right.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-foll...
More broadly, I'm not sure general "journalism" really has a bright future outside of the big names that can field huge advertising budgets. I'm more convinced that niche sites should specialize on a specific topic and figure out a use-case that makes it worth subscribing to from a business perspective, not an ideological one.
Links:
1. A good overview post: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/how-the-gamediscoverco-new...
To be fair, it doesn't have a bright history outside of that, either.
The key point here being that these publications are providing businesses with useful information, not just writing reviews and commentary for a mass audience.
I wish there were some more of their more "journalist"-type peer that made the migration over, but Kotaku seems to have done fine without them, so I don't think that's going to be a problem.
I will say that the site design is really bad. I hope they get something less "stock" pretty soon. I don't mind minimalism and clean design but...this isn't that. It looks like the pre-made "blog" template from some site-builder app. A design that highlights what they do best, while keeping news available chronologically, would really make the website comfortable to browse. Though, I do wonder if I'm just the odd man out, still going to a website to read gaming news. If they're delivering it through some kind of feed or whatever, I guess it doesn't really matter what the site looks like. Still; if they care about the site looking good, I hope they change it soon.
Other than that, a quick perusal of the content that's available seems to be very in line with what I would have found on Kotaku, so I'm very happy to just move all of my reading over to aftermath. It's a great plan and I wish them all the best in it! They've at least got one reader (though, not quite a subscriber; at least with what is currently offered).
Thanks for that heads up, I’m subscribed to their discord community (sigh, why is it discord), and excited to hear what comes next from the leaving employees.
This isn't to single out Aftermath specifically, I see this kind of thing all over the place. Lots of substack newsletters are particularly detached from reality when it comes to what they charge.
Yes, journalists need to be adequately paid of course, but I think this can be done much more effectively by charging a more reasonable monthly rate that will broaden the customer pool.
Unless you mean a psychological barrier?
They’re not paying to get news/articles about _a_ topic, they’re paying to get news/articles _from specific people_.
Can it?
For many, just paying anything at all is the initial hurdle.
But I do know game journalists don’t exactly produce the greatest content, everything from “the game is too hard 1/10” to IGNs obvious paid for scores to “this game has a male character, therefore it must be sexist”.
There's plenty of great games journalism out there. I'm similarly unsure about Kotaku, but let's not get silly here.
I’m detecting an air of elevated ego in your reply. I understand the toxicity that has and does (now to a much lessor degree) exist, but can’t we recognize when social justice jumps sharks? I think we can. It’s ok to admit when activism goes too far, wandering into the territory of enforcing morals onto other people; making the same mistake the religious right has done…
Don't we need to have a discussion first to debate whether you should be writing comments on such topics first? I mean, I didn't ask for your opinions, so I think it's a discussion worth having.
The initial articles are well written.
A comma splice isn't the end of the world, but if this is the post that's advertising your new enterprise to the rest of the world, then it tells me you have some inexperienced writers.
[0]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/nobody-understands-punctuation
ex. "Fortnite saw 3.9 concurrent players on OG’s launch day, besting recent records, and huge subsequent numbers. It was the number one category on Twitch, bolstered by a 24-hour stream by Ninja, who made his name on the game."
I think there's two things interacting here that make this more tractable than first impressions - first is that the cost of running one of these sites as a sustainable business is a hell of a lot lower than whatever crazy shit the PE & hedge funders were pushing for. I also think people's willingness to pay for quality content is higher than has been assumed, and I think part of that is a lot of us have seen what the cost of free content is over the last couple years.
I think you're right that these sites will never be more than niche by subscriber count, but I think there's more appetite now than before and I think it's entirely possible to make a sustainable business here.
I'm also generally in favor of a world where writers and creators get paid a decent wage to write and create things I find valuable or interesting, so I'm biased here.
I know we love decentralization here but I'd love if all these co-op sites shared an umbrella subscription, MaxFun style, where you could direct most of your subscription fee to the sites, or even the individual writers, that you want to support. Shared infrastructure, focused support.
They need a bit better website design though. You shouldn't need to scroll through an editorial column to get to the articles.
I think I’ll pass.
* https://www.keengamer.com/articles/news/kotaku-uk-apologizes...
> Mass Effect Andromeda was the straw for me
Always good to see a fellow Andromeda appreciator/semi-appreciator.
But both were still solid games. now ME:A had its faults (especially at launch), but to this day I blame Kotaku for single handily causing that game to fail and the public perception of it being the way it was and we never got the DLC that was clearly hinted at in the game. Which I am still frustrated about.
It seemed like on a daily basis for a couple weeks we got a negative article about ME:A from Kotaku and suddenly everyone talked about how bad it was even though they never played it.
Disclaimer: I have a Mass Effect tattoo that I plan on turning into a sleeve so I am not exactly... impartial
> I have a Mass Effect tattoo that I plan on turning into a sleeve so I am not exactly... impartial
I'd say this lends you even more credibility, because way too many trilogy superfans hated Andromeda to a silly extreme. And you get Mass Effect.
I often wonder how Andromeda would have been recieved if it wasn't branded a Mass Effect game, and launched like a week later.
Same deal with Halo, I also have a tattoo of it and I have stuck with Halo Infinite this entire time (and that is finally paying off).
I feel like many of those that hated Andromeda are also those that said that the ending of 3 ruined the franchise. Which... yeah the ending sucked. But I don't understand how a crappy 10-15 minutes ruins a close to 200 hour playtime for the trilogy. It for sure hasn't stopped me from replaying the entire trilogy multiple times or waking up this morning, seeing the date and knowing to put on my N7 shirt.
> I often wonder how Andromeda would have been received if it wasn't branded a Mass Effect game, and launched like a week later.
I have wondered that quite a few times. Especially if it still had the BioWare name attached to it just as a new IP. People would have been a lot less critical and... out for blood frankly. And maybe more people would have just ignored it and the game could have just had peace...
their position statement is in the fourth paragraph, it starts with "widespread labor organizing, industry-changing mergers and acquisitions, sweeping layoffs", and then reads "We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval." they bring up the issue of labor again, "we’ll keep you up to date on the worlds of video games, board games, comics, movies and tv, nerd culture, tech, streaming, and the labor issues that surround them"
would it be safe to assume that their goal is to be a kind of jacobin for gaming? jacobin's digital only pricing model is $30/yr, which $3/mo against aftermath's $7/mo, and i'm comparing them here on selective paywalling model. jacobin doesn't have dedicate gaming section, but they do write about video games from a socialist perspective, in their culture and labor sections.
i would say it's safe to assume that aftermath is going after a niche audience, people who want an indepth coverage of the video game industry from a socialist perspective, is that an attractive enough value proposition? they might also be explicitly trying to build an activist audience to be able to put political pressure on gaming industry. this is another possible reading from "holding power accountable". i'm not sure if that's compatible with their pricing model though.
You're perfectly entitled to dislike their work but it's weird to see people use language like this.
Also, what's wrong with being an activist? Is it bad to care about things now? What is their activism for? Are they an activist for something bad? If you specify what it is about their activism that's harmful it's much easier for people to understand the concern.
Labour issues, for example, are extremely relevant in video games since labour conditions at game studios frequently contribute to games shipping unfinished or in a bad state, and players actively dislike that. Games press cannot avoid covering labour conditions with how frequently crunch and layoffs harm the quality of shipped games.
i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media, and i generally don't. this is the part where you said "you're perfectly entitled", that's good that we agree on this. the rest of my op comment is my personal analysis of the nature of this new publication, which i thought was factual, because it's a collection of facts that i extracted out of this announcement, which i then used to make my decision about the publication. i've preemptively filed it in into a "do not click" category in my brain.
You can escape from politics in something like FIFA or Madden, I suppose, as long as you're willing to ignore the politics of the team ownership/management and how players are treated. And of course something like Tetris isn't intrinsically political, as long as you ignore the origins of the game itself (which is totally reasonable in a 'separate the art from the artist' fashion).
In practice with many games whether they seem 'political' to you or not depends on whether the game's politics are legible, and depending on our upbringing and education we may or may not be able to recognize a given political theme in a given game. It feels naive to act as if x% of games are Political and y% of games are Not Political and thus coverage should entirely avoid politics. Typically when you see political themes brought up in games coverage, it is usually in regards to games that have political themes beneath the surface, if not directly out in the open in the text of the game itself.
I totally understand the desire to escape from politics, and a good way to do that is to avoid reading coverage that focuses on the politics and to avoid playing games that engage too deeply with political themes. It just feels deeply misguided to me when I see people criticizing games journalists for 'bringing politics into it' when usually the games they're covering are already deeply political. It's fine to want to ignore that as a player but they are rarely bringing something in that isn't there.
A great example of this would be the Yakuza/Judgment series of games. They are filled with social commentary and themes that are most legible to someone who grew up in Japan, and if you read coverage of them from journalists with that context it can seem very political. To me as an American, I lack most of that cultural context so it's very easy to treat them as apolitical fun romps where gangsters fight against corrupt politicians or dirty cops. But even so, corrupt politicians and dirty cops are a problem here in my country too, right? To call these works apolitical from any perspective is perhaps trying a little too hard.
first of all we clearly have different relationship with video games, just by the games you've mentioned, or the fact that you've worked in the industry. i don't play call of duty, because i'm not on board with jock sniffers on political grounds. your other examples are similar, and i agree with you, a lot of video games are political, and i stand by my point. i don't like to engage with them! i find their treatment of political subjects to be juvenile, naive, reductionist, historically illiterate, and yet often moralizing and grandstanding. few games that aspire to deal with tough social subjects ever deliver. this is in my opinion.
there are two dimensions to the question of politics in video games, that make engagement with politics often an unpleasant experience. the question of familiarity that you touched on, and the question of player's choice. with low familiarity and low choice politics are not a problem. yeah i don't know anything about organized crime in japan, why would i care what the game tells me. with high choice politics are also not a problem, this is a very very very rare thing in the games treatment of politics. and i think the faux choice between "i sided with the developer's prefered political position, and got the good ending" and "i sided with developer's disliked political positions, and now i'm literally hitler" is not a real choice.
so the real problem with politics in video games is often high familiarity with low choice. the developer wants you to know that their guys are really the good guys, and they imbue them with all the political views that the developers share. you're "forced" to play out scenarios, where you are not invested in the narrative anymore, you're just doing it for the mechanics of the game. i've played shadowrun: dragonfall recently, you're part of an anarchist commune, and there's a lot of kind of talk that you hear in anarchist communes, and, man, i've been part of anarchist communes before, and all this talk is bullshit, but in the video game universe it works!
which gets me to my original criticism of "activist journalists". these people want more politics in their games not less. by virtue of their activism, and interest of the kind of audience they attract, they are also much more likely to dedicate both time to games with explicit political subjects, or often times explore games from political perspective. they are also much more likely to advocate for high familiarity, low choice games. that's my past experience with their output. there is a lot apolotical games, there's a lot of low familiarity political games, "activist journalists" pretty much gaurantee that politics is front and center of gaming experience.
When I see this I just think of that old joke that gamers think there are two sexes: male and political. Two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. etc etc you get the idea.
Bad news tho the political subjects are already in your escapist media your only choice is how you engage with them. Regarding any aspect of it as nonpolitical is itself a political act.
Aren't you doing the same? "There are two sides - my side and the evil side."
i'm not signing under your strawman, because it's not true. but i know the tactics you people use, because you took them straight from the commissar books of my homeland. history books will not treat you kindly.
I always interacted with Kotaku the way everybody should interact with a publication: there were some writers I liked, some I didn't, and some clickbait. It declined in quality over time until I stopped reading. That's all there is.
And if you really want to blame somebody, blame Kieron Gillen. Kotaku just merged New Games Journalism with the gossipy Gawker model to create a weird hybrid. Weirdly, a lot of what people complained about wasn't the Gawker stuff but the deep games criticism. The "hipsterdom" of it all. That was the best part! It was the clickbait that was annoying.
I think you got the cause and effect backwards here, unfortunately.