http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/arts/video-games/why-2014-was-a-troubling-year-for-video-games.html 2014-12-12 00:08:35 Why 2014 was a Troubling Year for Video Games As GamerGate shows, the video game industry is fast maturing, but the culture isn’t. === The British novelist and journalist John Lanchester Surely the artists would win in a romp, right? With time, the moral panics that afflict video games with metronomic regularity would be regarded as quaintly ridiculous, like the bonfires that once consumed rock ’n’ roll records. When the future seems inevitable, it almost certainly isn’t. And 2014 has proved that the cultural status of video games is as precarious as ever. Since Mr. Lanchester’s essay, an odd and discouraging front has opened in his struggle for the soul of video games: one between the artists and, of all people, the fans. During the summer and fall, a Twitter conflagration that used the hashtag “GamerGate” seemed as if it would In the most frightening, and in retrospect most farcical, moment, Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist YouTube critic, Video games used to have external enemies. There was Jack Thompson, the Florida lawyer who would sue publishers after a young person who played video games killed someone. There were United States senators like Joseph I. Lieberman, who began holding congressional hearings about violent video games more than 20 years ago. There were the California lawmakers who voted to ban the sale of some video games to minors. There was the film critic Roger Ebert, who said that video games could never be art. Over the past decade, each argument appeared to be settled in favor of the people who make and play video games. Mr. Thompson was disbarred. The Supreme Court ruled that video games were a form of creative expression protected by the First Amendment. The Museum of Modern Art began adding games to its permanent collection. Just last spring, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduated its first class of students for its With few outsiders left to fight, perhaps it was inevitable that video game players and creators would turn on one another. Before this year, the large and disparate group of people who love video games embraced the fiction that we all belong to a common subculture. Video game players supposedly liked not just the same games but also the same movies, the same books, the same fashions, the same highly caffeinated drinks and the same nacho-cheese-flavored snack chips. But as video games have undergone a kind of Cambrian explosion in diversity of form, the medium has become too large to be contained by its old stereotypes. That was the thrust of Ms. Alexander’s Gamasutra column that so angered some video game players: “ As Zoe Quinn, the creator of the game Depression Quest and one of the women who has been hounded by angry players beholden to an outdated and reactionary view of video games, said on MSNBC this year: “ My favorite game of 2014 was Left Behind is an extraordinary game. But taken as a whole, 2014 wasn’t much of a year for games as a creative form, which added to the sense of a medium in crisis. There were several big-budget turkeys, including Watch Dogs, Destiny and Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Still, there were plenty of good games, including The Sailor’s Dream; Hearthstone; Wolfenstein: The New Order; South Park: The Stick of Truth; 80 Days; and the second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead video game. On that list are games for your iPhone and iPad, a game where you shoot Nazis in the face, a game where you can use flatulence to vanquish your enemies, a game that is mostly text and a game where you play as an 11-year-old girl. Video games are as varied and weird and vibrant as ever. If there is optimism to be found in a sad and disappointing year, it’s this: Video games are, at long last, big enough for gamers to hate one another.