Following his trial for defamation of the families of the children and school staff killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is using Valve Corp.’s Steam, the world’s largest digital distribution platform for PC games, to sell an Infowars-themed video game. Jones claims to have earned hundreds of thousands in revenue from the video game, yet he has refused to pay the Sandy Hook families. Alex Jones: NWO Wars also mirrors and cartoonishly repackages the conspiracy theorist’s regularly violent, hateful rhetoric despite the platform’s policies against hate speech.
That is such an incredibly low bar. What passes as progressive values in AAA games is just a shoehorned and saccharine checklist progressiveness. I can almost understand why the chuds get annoyed because playing some games can be like bad corporate DEI training.
Right wing ideology meanwhile is baked into gameplay. It doesn’t matter much if the themes are anti-racist so long as every problem can be solved with the right gun. It doesn’t matter if you’re a socialist state in a strategy game who’s economy is straight out of the Chicago school.
A couple games get it right. “This War of Mine” shows you what’s happening in the out of bounds areas of Call of Duty. “Darkest Dungeon” is a microscope on the exploitation of capitalism. But good luck finding something like this in the AAA space.
Welp, so much for me trying to cite Wolfenstein 3D as a progressive-minded AAA game.
Guns are only for the right. Clutch my pearls and call me a swine if any leftist movement ever used violence, let alone gasp guns to accomplish their goal!