I know that typing this is likely a waste of time because you will probably label me gamergater even though I don't consider myself as one and delete it, but fuck it, whatever; procrastinating and typing my jumbled overtired thoughts out is slightly therapeutic. I don't like to put myself under a label because I disagree with gamergate almost as often as I disagree with you guys, but I'm not completely neutral.

My POV is that I don't agree that all games need to be hyper analyzed in the same way that a bad HS English teacher would try to analyze intent in themes that don't really exist. I'm not saying that it should be banned, I just don't really care to read about how the new Mario Party game has fascist undertones. This article doesn't really touch on that. It mentions many clearly political themes in games and sets up an easy strawman arguing to keep all politics out of games completely. That could be the gamergate position on it, in which case that's fucking stupid, but if you'll humour me and not assume that I hold all of their opinions I'd like to actually understand where the people in this sub differ from my views.

I should mention that I've read the Death of the Author essay because I know anyone that responds to this will bring that up, but some games are just supposed to be fun, you know? Why should people have to worry about if their game is going to be interpreted in a certain way?

I think that saying that a game like RE5 (as an example) is racist because it's set in Africa assigns some intent to the author whether you mean to or not (and from what I've seen, usually people mean to, regardless of all the "Death of the Author" references you make). This can make developers more likely to err on the conservative side when any story elements are decided for fear of their intent being misunderstood. I see this as bad because I don't want to have anyone censoring their creations for any reason. Some games can make you uncomfortable, and that's fine, just like some art is meant to make you uncomfortable.

My question to whoever cares enough to read all this is: why is encouraging the behaviour of reviewers to take a political stance on games clearly meant to be apolitical, such as Tetris or even pokemon, constructive?