Thanks for the polite response! I agree one can find aspects of a game racist/sexist etc without ignoring the other merits of the game, for example, most reviewers who found something objectionable about GTA V remarked on the game's aspects they did like (and gave it pretty high scores). I really do agree in theory…

Fair enough point, go ahead and replace "attack" with "criticism". My argument is still the same though. I'll also come back to the attack thing below.

Vitriolic comments are not acceptable and we could stay here all day swapping horror stories and pasting Twitter feeds, and we could do that without ever having made a…

Haha, thanks. I need to be better at making shorter posts though, I think I wrote like a small novella in response to your comment. I'm glad though to see people like EmpressInYellow commenting and making good points too. Good all around.

Excellent point and thank you for the rational response, we increasingly don't get those on Kotaku although it does seem to be getting better. The easy, and increasingly banal, response to this is the same banal response given by most critics now when their criticism are attacked: "I'm not saying we can never do that,…

This is one of the most chilling comments I have read. Truth.

It just drives me crazy because his video is a perfect example of how, yes, we have to allow political/social criticism of games, but that the ones doing the majority of the criticism all drink from the same ideological well. His critique of GTA V and the people not seeing it as offensive, is based on the assumption…

You may not be advocating for less art, but you are advocating for less of a particular type of art, i.e. art that is "racist".

Sociopaths and racists aside, no one really wants to produce art that is going to be seen as racist. The problem is that what if not everyone agrees with your belief that the art is racist,…

It can often feel as though some people who cover video games want to have it both ways: They want games(ers) to "mature" and, more precisely, tackle deeper and broader social and political material, while allowing for more viewpoints to be expressed in gaming and gaming criticism, but the moment someone critiques a…

Yeah, from what I see you still fight ghosts, explore caves, complete puzzles, help simple townsfolk, jump over precarious depths, and basically do a bunch of other stuff the "heroes" do in RPG's. I guess its supposed to be that you are a more common person dealing with all this stuff, but I mean the common person who…

Reminds me of a Penny Arcade comic:

It seems to me that it would be impossible to give fictional characters agency outside the realms of the fiction.
Going back to your initial response, my problem is that you have just argued that all sexualization is inherently objectification unless it is done for the purposes of backstory. If it is done for the…

I'm really not trying to take a position on this article at the moment because I don't know what I think about this, but it seems to me that one should move away from the idea that sexualized character models equals objectification. These are playable characters that will have the same agency and abilities of their…

The number of real-life occurrences that could easily fit into some satirical GTA V news alert or bleet continues to astound me.

You know, the Star Trek exception got me thinking. I wonder if the move towards portraying human ships as these grey, pragmatic, functional, and weapons heavy ships reflects a growing sense of cynicism towards our future and technology and space development's capacity to assist humanity in cornucopian ways? Star…

That seems to be a pattern in space sci-fi. Alien ships are curved, sleek, metallic looking. Human ships are blocky, modular, WWI dreadnought looking.

(just picked up Sins during Steam Summer Sale, only played it like twice, but I liked it)

I feel your pain brother. My gaming backlog only grows as my coursework swells to a size dwarfing even the mightiest EVE ship (actually in honesty, this is last semester and I have been enjoying doing significantly less work).

I don't even work though, so I shouldn't complain. I can appreciate how much time that takes…

That is actually what stood out to me visually, the detail for all the buildings. Seeing a mural up on the side of an old brick building with writing emblazoned on the side, driving around the more up-scale hipster stores with the crazy detailed facades.

Looks like Nintendo's going to have to.....catch them all!

I know what I'm supposed to take from this, but like too many snarky articles, it had me going "but...but". Innovate with HL3 and finish the story, a story which isn't quite as derivative as the article makes it out to be, heck expand on the story in the third one. Considering most modern big name FPS still don't…