I personally think that one of the main purposes of all media -- including both journalism and games -- is social commentary and, yes, criticism.
And, yes, the gaming industry deserves some goddamned criticism this decade. They are producing the same damned game over and over and over, and have essentially abdicated anything like artistic development or progress. Better graphics and special effects do not make something a better or different game. Re-skinning the enemies from Nazis to Orcs to Aliens to Demons to Jihadis or whatever else, or re-skinning the setting to medieval or far future or WWII or the Middle East, doesn't matter if the gamers don't have to think in new and different ways to win.
Doom came out 21 years ago. It was innovative, technically brilliant, a big risk for the company, had a very uncertain market, and challenged our culture to examine the way we thought about violence. Call of Duty: Ghosts came out in 2013 and it was one more knockoff cookie-cutter exploitation of a tired genre with a captive press and a carefully cultivated market. There is no new material about violence left to cover and the current generation of First Person Shooter games is therefore fairly pointless; they provide no new experience and no new cultural commentary over that provided by Doom and Quake 20 years past. I did that 20 years ago and don't need or want to do it again.
Further, the industry that produced them has no desire to produce social criticism or social commentary. They do not want to produce anything their audiences are uncomfortable with because they now *are* the mainstream, answerable to shareholders and lawsuits etc, and so are no longer in a position to criticize the mainstream. Further, they are no longer run by anyone who *wants* to produce social criticism or challenge people's beliefs or world views. They will give their audience games that do not challenge them to think or learn or to view the world differently than they viewed it the day previous. Which is simply another way of saying they are no longer run by artists and no longer in the business of producing art.
If games want to remain relevant, they need to start covering new ground. For example, the Binding of Isaac presents itself as an innovative and difficult critique of a certain kind of religious belief. It was published by someone who thought everyone would hate it, and was astonished to find that it had a real audience. Red Rogue presents a bit of an interesting take on mourning and obsession over a lost love. You can play these games in the same mindset as you play a FPS, but if you think a little beyond the surface, there is real content there which is no longer available from the now-mainstream and heavily calcified big studios..
If journalists and writers want to take up the job of social criticism that these people have set aside, I say more power to them. If the first thing they want to criticize is mainstream games and how they depict women and minorities and the way that depiction has not changed at all in the last N years,, I say that's a good start.
Hell, somebody's got to do it.
