I think "hobby" is too small a word for this! CoD:BlackOps took $650m in its first 5 days. Arguably the number of developers has fallen considerably, but the budgets and revenues involved are dizzying, and estimates of the value of the global games industry hover around the $80bn mark. With the global film industry…

Yes, that's what the policy is open to people doing. Perhaps they would enjoy any of the wide range of other gaming sites more, or find a home in Reddit somewhere. This is the risk they appear to be happy to take, seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that Kotaku has carved out a certain niche that is unusual in…

No, that always happened too. I remember this because I and others were remarking at the time, when the anti-Hernandez shitstorm was in its early stages, that a lot of the stories people were attributing to Hernandez in the comments were actually written by her male colleagues. Possibly she is writing fewer…

I hope you can understand I'm not going to point out the specific titles, which would negate the point of using a Burner account in the first place. Broadly, some Sony exclusives, Ubisoft and similar publishers, also TV, film, ads and so on.

In other words, "Stop your noise, I'm tired of hearing it"?

No, that's not how it looks to me at all. Totilo was pointing out that the direction Kotaku had been taking was deliberate, and they would not stop with a progressive outlook, and all readers should expect to see a lot more political pieces among the other games news.

I don't know why you assume the female character would be shitty though! I don't expect that. Rockstar are pretty good. I hated their treatment of Florian's homosexuality in GTA IV, but Elizabeta Torres didn't seem out of place, did she?

Do you mean do they ever criticise the other Gawker sites? If so, then yes it happens. There's some praise from some users there about Kotaku too.

I wish it was as simple as "don't like it, don't buy it". That's not going to change games by itself. It would be virtually impossible to be into games at all if you insisted on only supporting the changes you want to see, and I doubt the market would hear it through sales numbers alone. That's the great thing about…

The Wire had Snoop. The actor who played her was later convicted on gang-related crime charges.

Found it, here you go: http://kotaku.com/a-note-about-b…

Totilo wrote a big article warning everybody that they would no longer be tolerating offensive speech and behaviour. It's called something like "How to use the new Kotaku" or something like that. Roughly 3-4 weeks ago, I think.

If barely any of the games being released featured men, and if the 7th major incarnation of the biggest franchise in gaming featured 3 characters at once and not one of them was male, you might be bitterly disappointed. Not with one game, but with the whole industry.

Well, she's right. This community was so insufferable that the management had to threaten it to make it mend its ways recently, and it's still early days on that goal.

Read the interview. I disagree with his stance, and I think he's got totally the wrong end of the stick on just about every point (not least his assumption that adding more female characters is only of interest to women), but I do agree that I don't want to see diversity simply as an option. This would get the…

Presumably the whole Spongebieb Squarepants thing is an evolutionary decoy to confound his natural predator, the Bourdain.

Assimilation.

Yeah, I agree. I don't know what Beyond:TS will be like, but I'm not really a fan of these kinds of options unless they're robust. I'm quite happy for a story to simply be written however the writers thought was best. I can't think of a game yet where the small options meant anything to me (I haven't played any of the…

Well, no of course not! But here the option is "become romantically involved"/"do not become romantically involved". I don't know what other expression can be partway between those two (at least, with the graphical power of PS3 in a continuous game engine).

That's part of the problem. A lot of men defending the status quo will say "I don't mind, as long as it's a choice", so even when good people like yourself suggest it I still get little echo-shivers from the times the men have said that by way of throwing feminism a bone. Some of those guys are even referencing those…