Waypoint has offered, for the last two and a bit years, an almost unique perspective on games and the games industry.
Unashamedly political in an industry that shuns politics. Unashamedly leftist in an industry that skews right. Unashamedly safe for women, BAME and LGBT folks* in an industry that is largely hateful towards them.
I thought about this post too long. Because it's an encapsulation of ResetERA.com's continued confusion about politics, "everything is political" and what entails "leftism" underpinning their entire crusade.
Waypoint isn't "unashamedly political" nor "unashamedly leftist" anymore than Kotaku is. Its political interests (and feel free to compare this to ResetERA.com's) are very thin cleavage interested in purely a mainstream upper class cultural milieu. It's a reactionary politics based entirely around conceptions of group identities and unstated notions of oppression. It knee jerks against anything from an out group in defense of anything in the in group. The "political" messages are entirely self-obviously supporting within the group. The Buttigieg being gay thing is a good example, he's gay therefore he understands...well, nothing. Because he can only speak to his own personal experience, not Ms.Galaxy's need to fight off chasers every single day in the horror fields of Boston. A recent popular statement from the threads that Finale Fireworker dumps boilerplate on and then gets to banning over is "trans rights are human rights" or "sport is a human right" yet neither of these claims are ever broken down and explained politically, it's simply self-evidently "good" and therefore supported.
We can look at the claim regarding "leftism" in a similar manner. Waypoint and ResetERA.com don't construct actual leftist ideologies, nor adopt them from elsewhere. Their primary ideology as I've argued regularly is reactionary and defensive of a specific and surprisingly narrow conception of what they don't see as a status quo. They don't support unions, or universal health insurance or anything else due to an underlying construction of how the world should operate, they both snag it from elite authorities who tell them to support it and because people they dislike oppose it. To take the original foundation of "left" and "right" we have simply on the left the rejection of the status quo and on the right a defense of the status quo. In Revolutionary France, in the Soviet Union even, this never got to the point of outlining an ideology, and certainly not one what WayERA.com subscribes to. Their ideology is a reflexive defense of a status quo they identified with as they constructed their self-image. They aren't "non leftists" because of their obsession with corporations like Disney or Nintendo or whatever, they're non-leftist because their ideal is a status quo where the continued dominance of things they like, be it Marvel films, Nintendo Directs or the Democratic Party continues unchecked.
When it comes to analyzing video games, Waypoint certainly does not, and ResetERA.com doesn't either, do much of anything to challenge the status quo in 90% of subjects within the industry. Video games, like most forms of art have always bumped up against societal acceptance, Mortal Kombat coming back around again as a controversy is a perfect example. An indie game that outlines some kind of shitty "message" while having no actual gameplay doesn't challenge the status quo of gaming. The things that challenge the status quo of gaming are those that cause revolutions within the industry and drag large chunks of it with it. PUBG and Fortnite are far more revolutionary and "leftist" than any lame ass "social justice" thing Waypoint is pushing. Both upended the industry, helped create entirely new markets like popular Nazi streamers, rewrote the way the consumer interacts with the product, and brought Chinese spyware onto our computers thanks to riotious's one man agenda.
Complaining about the designs or characterizations of characters inside video games or how a video game that before controversy probably would have been ignored is so terrible is a fools idea of a "political engagement" with gaming subjects. Cultural critique is a high class salon endeavor, it's a perfect example of ResetERA.com's moronic meme about how "only rich people can afford to [do whatever]" in that only the upper class salon can afford to navel gaze about the exposed femoral arteries of a character model.
It's "political" and "leftist" purely in the sense that they have distilled politics, and even leftist politics, down to merely the act of bitching about something they don't like online, often in bad faith purely for performative purposes. The more hyperbolic the better.
We can even make a case that the video game journalism outlets that continue to attempt to recreate the same outlets that have existed forever and merely tweak them around the edges as dominantly conservative enterprises. While something like Giant Bomb was an elite form of what has become the YouTube channel revolution of games coverage where select channels specifically don't do what everyone else is racing to do the same as others. Giant Bomb just flat out playing games, especially obscure random shit or things like FLIGHT CLUB, for an hour was a revolutionary concept when they did it a decade ago. Dunkey and Yahtzee have both gained followings because they deconstructed and then reconstructed the video review/preview. Both
write scripts that they write and re-write and connect to the images on screen and even music choices, something that the status quo reviewers of an IGN or etc. essentially don't. (In that specific case they may simply lift another video's transcript for the script. doge) Because their goal ultimately is to recreate what came before and attach it to what's seen as new without conceptualizing
why their meeting things on a checklist don't make them competitive with amateurs.
Just hypothetically, Dunkey may be Lou Dobbs Jr. and support everything Trump does. But in the sphere of video game writing (and this is what he does ultimately) it's him, not the "unashamedly political" Waypoint or Polygon that is a status quo rejecting revolutionary. Best illustrated by the montage he put together of "it really makes you feel like Batman" clips. He critiqued the video game writer culture in a way that challenged its very assumptions. Waypoint saying "we aren't going to review this game [because social justice reasons]" isn't revolutionary, editorial has always wrote whole swaths of titles out of what they covered for all kinds of reasons. CGW and PC Gamer didn't review all the many porn games
that advertised in the back of their issues and didn't have to explain why.
Plus even in terms of "performative leftism" Waypoint already showed their cards when they shut up and repeated corporate's talking points regarding #MeToo and unionism.
