It's like some of their misguided social studies warrior endeavors. They're trying to make games, and by relation themselves, much more important than they actually are, so they're taking up the banners of some outside movement and trying to staple gun it onto their video game coverage.
But they aren't actually thinking any of it through, so you have people like McElroy demanding that game journalists ask when game makers are going to stop making their games fun because of a terrible crime that happened.
And then they're baffled when readers don't care for it.
One thing that came to my mind was the kerfuffle over Modern Warfare 2's hamfisted airport slaughter. I recall a lot of handwringing about how games are supposed to be fun and this isn't fun and therefore wrong and so on. Most of the media missed SpecOps' narrative around the same time because the game itself wasn't as fun or well put together as the narrative. And how they hopped on with Fox News bashing the Six Days in Fallujah game and Medal of Honor's use of the Taliban in multiplayer. They often want to have it both ways, where games are serious art, but there's an escape hatch.
You often see the same thing in sports writing/journalism.
I still prefer the people angry at EA for "making light" of World War I. I'm glad that's a thing.
Thankfully, Splatoon shows us a better path.
