games

she's doing exactly what "Gamers" wanted

What gamers wanted was for a conga line of NYT Op-Ed writers to treat E3 like the Met Gala and shamelessly fawn over their own fan-list of creepy online weirdos like they're Manhattan royalty.

They didn't want games treated like art. They wanted their niche hobby to be drooled over like a collection of Fabergé eggs.

And then they lose their minds because they have exactly 2 braincells

I grew up on a lot of gaming pundits, back in the 90s/00s, who bemoaned the wretched state of the industry and attributed that to many of the shortfalls and self-sabotage that ruined the industry. Critics like Lum the Mad (Scott Jennings) and Mr. Destructoid (Yanier Gonzalez) and the Penny Arcade folks were all in or adjacent to the industry and were mostly speaking out as enthusiastic-but-jaded fans.

But there's not a ton of money in honest game criticism or shameless QA horror stories. So they either faded away or sold out.

Sarkassian was in this tradition for a minute, and garnered a pretty active following as a consequence. But because she was an EW GIRL and because her criticism was feminist rather than merely technical, she became a victim of her own success.

These people aren't stupid. They're very canny with their delivers. They just recognize that going ham on the industry itself isn't where the money is at. You can both get a large audience AND avoid pissing off the advertising money by playing inside baseball and screeching at THE GIRL ad nauseum. And as The Algorithm rewards homogeneity and length, you end up with these increasingly absurd "Look What ANNA SARKASSIAN did THIS TIME!" four hour long rants. This shit will end up sounding stupid because there's nothing left to be said that isn't pure fabrication or long-winded rehashing of the original afront.

But they do get people exposure, which gets them money, which allows them to climb the ladder into more prestigious positions.

Which is all any of these losers really want.