Or rather, even if you forget about Gamergate and what they did in the name of ‘ethics’, are ethics actually something to care about when it comes to gaming journalism?
Are they though? Games may be leisure activities, but I’d say a closer parallel would be movie journalism or some other journalism that provides reviews to potential customers, thereby influencing the market. (I should add at this point that this has nothing to do with Gamergate’s claims, which don’t even seem to have had any merit in the first place). Video games make over $100b annually and that’s increasing fast, so in theory there’s a definite consequential impact to how they’re presented and which games are promoted. Where calls for ethical journalism mean “don’t criticise games for their poor handling of social issues, and continue to value some gamers over others”, I don’t think any ethical journalist can agree to that.
Personally, I think people don’t like when they feel preached to, and it’s been accepted for a long time that games occupy an ethically neutral sphere. Once that idea is challenged, people are going to react to it because they know that there are a lot of regressive elements to some major games. Much like the Civil War being about states’ rights, this is really about white men wanting continued control.
