It’s amazing how the mainstream media thinks they can just blatantly lie about easily verified facts and control the narrative thereby:
Originally intended as a short about the indie game scene in Mr. Francois’s native Australia, “GameLoading” soon transformed into a feature about indie developers worldwide. Among the interviewees are Ms. Quinn, who created the free, text-driven interactive fiction game Depression Quest in 2013. Instead of battling dragons and demons, players fight clinical depression. Ms. Quinn’s creation enraged some gamers, who objected to its subject matter and to the fact that, like more conventional video games, it was being released on Steam, a popular digital store. Anonymous trolls sent her rape and death threats and posted her home address and phone numbers online, prompting her to relocate.
Mr. Francois has struggled to understand why fans of mainstream games would feel threatened by an indie like Depression Quest, since they’re hardly in competition with one another for fans. “The reality is, we’re going to see more games, and more variety of games. Obviously, Activision isn’t going to kill off their first-person shooters.”
It’s not that hard, Mr. Francois. No one is threatened by Depression Quest. But everyone was furious that a bunch of game journos tried to claim it was a great game, then conspired to hide the fact that some of them had personal connections to Quinn.
As for Activision, there is this out of Redmond:
In an interview dating back to late last year, Bonnie Ross, the woman in charge of stewarding and developing the blockbuster HALO franchise, stated that her goal in managing the franchise was to increase the diversity of characters appearing in the games produced by Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries. She further reinforced her position on women in the gaming industry by stressing the importance of hiring more female game developers and giving them role models to aspire to within the industry.
Ms. Ross’s influence has already been heavily felt within the HALO canon: she is the executive responsible for tearing up the original script for HALO 4, which featured women as villainous characters, and forcing a complete rewrite to include stronger female protagonists.
So, do they seriously struggle to understand or are they just disingenuous? We know perfectly well that Ross will turn HALO into the tale of a female Master Chief torn between her love between two soldiers if given the opportunity. While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, male gamers don’t want that in their games. If they did, they’d be reading Twilight.