Every year since 2011, I’ve put together some kind of game of the year list for some audience somewhere. At the tip of the decade it was while I was in college, in the library and patiently waiting for the Americans who I vaguely knew via email to upload it to the website. At uni, I stood in a gallery and watched my friends read scripts we’d written on their favourite games. 2016 I was an antidepressant mess and 2017, angry at what things had turned out like in the year prior. 2018, I never bothered to publish the article because it was just too sad. At some point in December in 2019 I thought about bringing it back under the guise of the heavily popular “Games of a Decade”, but then realised that gaming doesn’t actually really deserve to be put on a pedestal for its ‘decade’.
Video games in the 2010s bring up a wide variety of feelings and memories. The products were good and the emerging voices are hopefully elevated a little more in the future. But, the majority that take part in this industry – that’s you and me – in any capacity across the globe deserve absolutely no commendation for a decade well done.
You deserve nothing. We deserve nothing.
Video games in the 2010s saw the boiling pot of a mixture of toxic communities culminate into a disgusting explosion that infested and rot the core foundations of a lot of people. A vicious smear campaign in the name of ‘ethics’, when it was just vile attempts at subduing the growth of the industry in what should be incredibly basic ways, destroyed people’s lives like Zoe Quinn, who’s only crime was being involved with a man with a grotesque mindset that sparked an outrage that should have never happened.
Anita Sarkeesian, someone who brought a new dimension to the industry conversation in thoughtful analysis, was ridiculed for her attempts at bringing something that wasn’t just the slight skin shred of gameplay reviews that were common at the time.
Nerd culture refused to budge and while sub-sections did, the loudest, most vicious voice of all seeped through and we didn’t do enough to subdue before it was too late. Because of hatred towards the people involved at the core of 2014’s catastrophic turning point, we let the fucking nazis back in.
Not only did we let in the Nazis and far-right via our industry’s backdoor, but we then watched as Breibart, Fox News and Info Wars went from laughable outlets to outright weapons of societal destruction. We failed as a society, as these voices grew right under our noses and we did nothing to stop it, almost rolling over and just admitting that there was nothing we could do. It’s these voices that lent a hand to generate support for parties like the BNP and EDL (thankfully beaten down), but provided enough space for people like Nigel Farage to govern time on television long enough to legitimise the inclusion of the far-right. These voices of hatred and fear-mongering lead to a constant rise by the right-wing and eventually, a stranglehold.
The video game industry was an elaborate jumping off point to get the message heard about far-right views to a very impressionable audience that without a doubt, knew a little bit of what they were getting themselves into. Once people saw Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones effectively getting away with it, dozens of copycats that caused the reach of the right wing to infest like a curse from the outside in.
Disgusting. The events of 2014 defined the decade. It maximised an issue within the video game community that had been there since the start and something that’s in every crevice of nerd culture as a whole. A venom that can’t satiated without those at the wheel completely bending to their will and by God if they don’t, they might just send a death threat.
The 2010s was a decade of ‘having a normal one’. An overreaction to one thing would eventually lead to something happening that was unprecedented. In the last decade, what happened in the pop culture industries and those surrounding it began to shape the future in ways it didn’t ever intend. With a firm right-wing grasp for the foreseeable future, if 2014’s origins were terrifying at what we let in, 2016 and 2019 continued to pump energy into it, even with the far better options available to the public at large.
Originally, I’d planned to do this in this article:
So before I awkwardly swing back into talking about the wrongs of the industries I look at every day, I want to say this:
Instead, I’ll save it and post it later. Instead, I’ll just say it now:
If you voted for the Tories: fuck you. If you plan to support a weak-willed, short-sighted centrist in 2020’s American Election: fuck you. If you plan to support the Republicans: fuck you.
The video game industry might have done more wrong than right, but what it did do was give me first-hand experience at what happens when you sit in the middle and it solves nothing. Crush the right wing under your boots and see to it that whatever they do is seen to properly. If a Centrist tries to wade in, shove them back out. We’ve no space for them anymore and we should have never done so to begin with.
If you’ve sat there in silence and just watched this unfold, it’s time to grab your shit and start shouting back. Don’t let the right wing win and definitely never take a centrist at their word. Defend those who need it, donate where you can and for those of higher status than the rest of us, help.
Fuck Billionaires. Fuck Millionaires. Fuck the right wing. Fuck us for letting it get this bad.
So while you sit and debate the top ten games of the decade, just think what the industry and those around it contributed to these last 10 years and make sure that by the end of 2029 we’re not having the same conversation.