In recent years, members of the alt-right have, in blog posts and in YouTube videos, courted young men who share an interest in video games. (The wooers include
Steve Bannon, when he was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and the former Breitbart editor
Milo Yiannopoulos, who churned out posts with titles such as "Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.") This scheme has proved effective. Last month, a YouTube user uploaded a clip from the recent blockbuster video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy playpen set in the late-nineteenth-century American Southwest. In it, the player guides his character toward a computer-controlled suffragette who is campaigning for her right to vote, and punches her unconscious. The video, titled "Beating Up Annoying Feminist," has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, with a chorus of support in the comments below.
This kind of trolling can easily escalate. Earlier this month,
NPR broadcast a story in which a father recounted his dismay at finding a neo-Nazi pamphlet that his fifteen-year-old son had printed out after being encouraged by fellow-gamers. "I was crying," the man said. "I felt like a failure that a child that I had raised would be remotely interested in that sort of stuff."
The cultural problems around video games, of course, inhere not just in their young players but in their creators. There remains a woeful lack of diversity among those who design video games, and, in the industry at large, among those who decide what kinds of games are made in the first place. But the tectonic plates still shift, slowly, and, at the edges, work of intelligence and interest is produced. While 2018 was hardly a vintage year for video games, there were releases that nevertheless excited, stimulated, and challenged their audiences to think for themselves. Here are nine.
