While navigating the landmines and lasers to try and write “non-political” pieces on gaming, I’m faced with the fact that there was never a safe path forward.
It was something that’s gone on around a lot before I stepped into this project—Gamergate, DEI, Sweet Baby, over and over and all over social media and news outlets as the tensions got much higher during the United State’s election year. The discussions were long and often tiring, including a growing group of centrist perspectives in which they simply wanted it to stop and avoid any sort of political discussion when referring to gaming. The concept of whether or not games were “political” was a major discussion that pushed its way to the forefront of discussion considering the future of the country was rather uncertain with a major shift on either side of the spectrum. It does beg the question:
Why am I discussing it now?
As I’ve noted, I do attempt to stay in this “non-political” stance and discuss mostly the concrete details of gaming that don’t interact with the current landscape within my country. In that way, I also adopted a similar view to the aforementioned centrists asking for a defocus on the nature of discussion. This view is, as I recognize, largely flawed considering a lot of ways it adjusted my articles even just halfway into this month-long project. With specific examples, there’s many friends and even myself questioning why I mentioned the particular price points in gaming with my Switch 2 article without any mention of the elephant in the room concerning how tariffs affect the gaming world, something consistently appearing in my research. I did my best to write the tariffs out of my story because it felt less universal to my audience—some of which I understand are outside of the United States—and also because it was directly addressing the fallout of the Trump administration’s rise to power. I recognize now that I had to actively hinder my discussion in order to appear “non-political” in a way that made my article less informed than it should have been.
It was this reflection with 15 articles behind me and 15 more to write that made me realize that with every downside I suffered from this viewpoint, I failed to reap the benefits. Plenty of my writing has been referring to accessibility and advancement in gaming that’s plenty divisive in gaming considering the nature of left and right leaning viewpoints. It also isn’t like I’m unfamiliar with being politicized—I’m a walking talking example of the way politics are invasive in day to day life, living as a non-white transgender lesbian who’s neurodivergent and openly averse to current policies within the government. Even if my work was to somehow be viewed as politically neutral in a way that attracts someone with a conflicting political leaning, any amount of research into who I am will leave them feeling tricked. There is an argument to be made that my coverage can be more amicable to the centrist perspective I’d mentioned in making it feel like a less politically charged discussion, but even that is untrue considering the way my beliefs manifest into my writing. Working to make games accessible to audiences of new players is a political stance considering the way it benefits underprivileged people and minorities, as well as my views on anti-corporation pricing that supports developers but not the greed of publishers.
It’s this discussion that made me realize that the spectrum of political discussion I placed myself on was a completely unspoken rule I never assigned for this challenge. In some form of reserved discussion I wanted to make, I acquiesced to the belief that media can be non-political in a way that supports a form of unbiased coverage. There are facts and details that come through as unbiased, but a major element to that comes from quoting other opinions and views and coverage simply of what occurred rather than the meaning of it. Within my university degree, I’ve had one—and soon two—opportunities to work on editing for Wikipedia with a major focus on this unbiased viewpoint. For these projects, I’ve had a major interaction concerning “WP:NOT” which is the term for discussion in forums about content not being a part of Wikipedia’s concept of unbiased coverage. With the way bias functions in articles, I’ve gone through coverage of political articles in order to determine bias and found that with these examples the non-biased elements are through simply quoting or stating what happened in order for it to be outside of your hands. Even then, articles like the one above make direct choices to cover and quote the things they do in order to illustrate their view of the situation in what feels to be true. It’s this understanding of bias that gives me a nuanced perspective on how news must inevitably interact with its bias and the political stances behind authors.
As I’ve demonstrated with the difference in this article from my previous work, there is a spectrum in which this exists. Blanket statements about accessibility are clearly less political than direct calls for action about policies being enacted, but the idea that a perspective exists off of this spectrum with a purely unpolitical view is only true if you distill information into a stilted, uninformative way that does nothing. This form of coverage is solely the copying of words from a source that, in practice, would result in something worse than the readers simply viewing the source themselves. It is this reason that the usage of Wikipedia as a source isn’t used further into academia—while my professors have an educated view of the internet in order to understand that “everyone can edit Wikipedia” is just a false statement, they also recognize that the information provided is distilled in a way that provides nothing beyond the quoted sources. The nature of opinion and bias within the rhetoric of a writer is what makes an article what it is rather than just a note of something occurring, and it’s a futile pursuit of “unbiased” characteristics that bogs down proper coverage.
I understand this article is dense and also heavily political in the way it discusses itself, but I wish to use it to challenge the view of what a political statement really is—independent of my reference of my own personal political experiences previously, this article maintains a perspective and moral that I would argue does not lean to the left of right. Our morality and beliefs on what is right and wrong are part of what makes us who we are, and dulling that down for writing and discussion about anything—even media—is an erasure of our ethos. Despite whether you disagree or agree with my beliefs for gaming and the industry, I’m sure that you can at least somewhat connect with my belief to discuss how the nature of bias functions in writing as an assisting lens to view information. This also changes how people who view things through a “non-political” lens interact with articles such as this one—I would argue to challenge yourself and push through exhaustion to understand why this rhetoric is necessary. If you’re unable to or disagree with my beliefs I’ve outlined, you’re much better off reading Wikipedia or the primary sources occurring in order to gather your own “unbiased” information.
Just don’t expect you can share it without being hoisted by your own petard.