Too little, too shy: The gaming industry’s response to #BLM | Opinion

Pavel Afanasiev, one of the co-founders of Northern Lights Entertainment, the studio behind Nebulae, reacted to Gaming companies wanting to get away with tokens of sympathy for #BlackLivesMatter during an interview for Gamesindustry.biz.

 

Studios have been serving players with politically-charged material for decades: The critique of runaway capitalism in Bioshock, resisting oppression through violence in StarCraft, religious dogmatism in Halo — arguably, political issues have inspired some of the most successful industry titles to-date.

“What I mean is, I don’t want real-life politics in my games,” I hear them usually follow up.

That is the moral equivalent of seeing a world on fire, then looking the other way. Like it or not, politics are already deeply intertwined with gaming, and they are not going anywhere. When professional players get suspended for using their platform to take a political stance; when games are routinely edited or banned to please a local authority prior to a release; when studios fail their diversity efforts — or pretend that they don’t need them — all of this is politics at play.

 

Read the full interview on gamesindustry.biz.