that article was weird and was some giant hit piece on Jonathan Blow as a person

Agingcoder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s on Polygon, which writes cultural and political essays on games - they’re not really reviews focusing on game mechanics, player experience etc ( well they do talk about it but it’s usually drowned under other concerns ).

Whether you agree with them or not is not my point ( and yes in this particular case they visibly dislike the game designer’s politics and this eats up a large part of the article) - just that it’s expected .

The fact they look like reviews is very confusing though ( I looked around the website this one is under ‘impressions’ not ‘reviews’ though ) unless you consider politics should be an integral part of reviews but that’s a complicated discussion.

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derektank 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wish they were a bit more self reflective about this. The author says, “I’m not raising these points to get a dig in on Blow for a perspective I personally disagree with,” but come on, let’s be real. You absolutely are raising these points to get in a dig at him, if only because you know your audience will complain if you don’t. Like, I find Blow to be a huge blowhard (nominative determinism at work) but having played the Witness, you can absolutely write a review of that game without mentioning his politics and I seriously doubt that Order of the Sinking Star is different. If you want to write about his politics, that’s great, there’s a lot of grist there to discuss. But stop pretending you’re doing something other than opinion journalism

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cubefox an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah. It's less "opinion journalism" and more "dig journalism". They are essentially trying to punish their political enemies by using every chance to mention the political stance of the enemy in question, so that the readers of the publication (who largely share their political opinion with the journalist) categorize him as "the enemy" rather than judging his work without prejudice.

It's a particularly dirty form of culture war. Rather than restricting their political disagreements to articles about the subject matter "out in the open", these journalists sneak in opportunities to throw shade at people in articles that aren't about politics at all. And in this case the journalist even has the gall of adding a faux innocent "Oh I’m not raising these points to get a dig in".

	▲	Arodex 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>rather than judging his work without prejudice It seems perfectly pertinent to show the wide gap between the game's message and the developer's message. So weird that you want journalists to "shut up and play ball" while the developer doesn't have to. If anything, it is Blow and Trump who are finding and attacking political enemies everywhere, all the time. You are fine with culture wars, but only when they come from one side - the other side is dirty and terrible to have the galls to do the same.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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DonHopkins 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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dgellow 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It reads as balanced and reflective