actually, you know what IGN? fuck you
it IS the responsibility of the reviewer to present the product as it exists in the world. the idea that games should be reviewed on purely objective measures, and that discussion of the story or the game's presence in the world is a separate issue, assumes that the game exists as just those mechanisms. just a shooty wizard game where you blast the bad guys, bang bang!
(dont think too hard about why the bad guys look the way they do)
video games have stories in them. stories exist in our world. culture is built around plenty of things, and that includes stories! religions and myths are built on stories
harry potter has such a cultural presence in the world that its creator could stand up on stage and call for the hanging of trans folk, and plenty of people would still ride the funny wizard motorcycle in the theme park. art sans artist, right? stripping creators' works from their motivational context is surely the ethical thing to do. no wonder we're at the point where AI art can be called anything but theft
anyways, so. video games are art. we all agreed on that like sixteen discourses ago, right? if not, we'll circle back to it in the next discourse
if games are art, then video game critics should be assumed to do double-duty as art critics, no? sure, some people are better at understanding or talking about pure gameplay, others at art. maybe the mass layoffs caught all the art critics!
or, they left because they weren't being paid enough. anyways.
in the case of the funny wizard game, to say "it's not our job to address this franchise culturally, or its creator" passes the buck of finding all that out onto the consumer. sure wish there was a place i could go to learn about why people are boycotting this video game, but i guess not you, video game journalism website. that's not your job after all, according to you.
sure glad that video games exist outside of all lived reality! imagine if a precedent of games critics not addressing political or moral issues in and around the media was set. god, the kind of things malicious game studios could get away with!
better be sure to nip that in the bud before the military industrial complex uses a popular yearly release as marketing and indoctrination in young up-and-coming purple heart scouts
anyways. yeah, actually, you are supposed to tell people the wizard lady is a far-right bigot
Their post is rancid.
Media does not live in a vacuum. Objectivity does not truly exist. No one can be truly objective - we all have biases, socializations, and other factors that influence how we view the world. Any journalist claiming they are being objective about a contentious topic is lying. No person on this planet can extract themselves from the culture and world enough to be objective on any given topic. We're all engulfed in the same soup. Objectivity requires separation from the media, from the topic, where there is no influence of it on that person, except such a separation cannot ever exist. All of us are influenced by a multitude of different ideas, concepts, politics, situations, etc. That part of what living in a society is. (Don't make me get out my philosophical arguments on objectivity. I'll include my quantum mechanics knowledge.)
This honestly feels to me like a way for IGN to pretend they care about us trans people while also not upsetting the groups feeding them money. The review IGN writes won't be objective, it will be taking a stance regardless. And that unwritten stance is that IGN is okay with supporting a deadly transphobic author (and I say deadly because Rowling has agreed with several TERFs who outright described trans genocide) by reviewing this game AND by not discussing the politics that informed the game.
Because again, No Game Exists In A Vacuum. All games have politics influencing it whether the author of the game realizes it or not. Those politics will show up in the game play, the dialogue, how characters and setting is constructed.
Look at Rowling's Wizarding world for instance. Notice the bankers in that world? They are the epitome of horrid Jewish stereotypes. Not commenting on this and showing the issues with it means the reviewer took a stance for the stereotypes instead of against them. Silence in the face of bigotry is often complicity -- those who created the bigoted and harmful media will interpret that lack of backlash as support of their work.
So all IGN is really doing is stabbing us marginalized folks in the back as they try to doublespeak us into thinking they give a shit about us. They don't. They care about money. If they gave one iota about us, then they'd be honest in their review and discuss the politics that influenced this work.