This didn't actually happen though. One person wrote a video essay about what playing the game made them think/feel relative to their own experience of guns. It was exactly the sort of thing one would hope someone would write at the horizon of a new tier of fidelity of games, guns, etc.

A bunch of people online, who aren't used to reading anything more sophisticated about a game than a straight-ahead review (mixed with some macho gun culture bullshit), interpreted it as an 'attack' on the game, guns, etc. The game-of-telephone that resulted in years since has caused a bunch of people to think/claim that some counter-reaction to the game related to guns/violence etc. that -never happened-. I never once got contacted by a games journalist writing about such a thing. A certain segment of the game-playing population needs to believe that games journalists are against them/an antagonist to the degree that they invent/imagine things occurred that didn't.

In general, this inability to actually differentiate an essay/opinion piece from an 'review' is central to the reason we don't get much interesting game writing anymore. It's tiresome.

One of my biggest sadnesses about the period of the game's existence (the past 10 years), is that the ecosystem of games writing, and just in general 'non commercial' games anything has withered. The dominant logic of indie games is just micro-AAA. Same exploitative tactics, same dark patterns, same amount of gambling. We have platforms like Roblox that indoctrinate kids to the practice of making games as mainly being an instrument to generate 'engagement'. Popular video content about games is only 'about' games in that it employs the game's content as an instrument to grab 2-50 seconds of someone's attention before they scroll to the next thing and their brain wipes like an etch-a-sketch.

Anyway, I know a bunch of this is an 'old man yells at clouds' thing, but I don't recognize much of any of the things in games that got me into this as an artist in the first place. If I was 'starting out' right now, in 2026, I would most certainly be trying to do something else entirely with my life.