So yesterday, I tweeted a throwaway tweet. It… got some attention. Let’s break this down.

Whenever I see gamers say that games didn’t used to have politics, I think about Will Wright telling me how the message of The Sims was supposed to be that owning more things doesn’t necessarily make you happier, or if it does, it adds a higher upkeep cost to your life. — Old Man Schubert, Design Crank (@ZenOfDesign) December 11, 2018

For a long time, there has been a contingent of people demanding that we ‘get politics out of games’. This was a cornerstone of GamerGate, of course, but these diseased outrage junkies have attacked creators in almost every genre of popular culture you can think of. Right now, the pathetic manbabies that populate the ranks of Comicsgate gets the most attention, but they’ve also attacked movie directors and studios, television creators, and in gameing, communities around Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering and Board Games in general have had to deal with this simpering fuckwaditude.

They exist in the board gaming space too, claiming “SJWs are ruining board games these days with politics”. Even though the original Monopoly from 115 years ago was created by a leftwing feminist as a warning about the evils of unchecked capitalism. — Barry Hood (@bazzyh) December 11, 2018

The outrage junkies are peddling falsehoods, of course. Politics have been inherent in all of these media since their early inception. The first megahit movie was basically a Klan recruitment video. The first issue of Captain America had him punching Hitler in the face, and his best runs have been about the line between patriotism and nationalism. Radio’s finest moment may have been when the Superman radio serial humiliated the Klan. I could go on.

But then again, the same people who rant about ‘politics infecting my media’ aren’t mad about V for Vendetta being an ode to anarchy. They somehow manage to love both the Winter Soldier and the Dark Knight despite the fact that the two movies give pretty much opposing views to the concept of citizen surveillance. They have no problem with the fact that most realistic shooters have a political message being ‘the only solution here is to kill brown people’, or the fact that winning a game of many flavors of Civ often requires you to embrace ecological responsibility.

What bothers them – the thing that gets them riled up – are putting a woman in the battlefield in World War 2. Having the two leads of the new Star Wars films not be white. Making Thor a woman. Giving Iceman a gay kiss. Making Heimdall black. Having a female Doctor Who.

They’ll criticize these as decisions driven by ‘politics’. They aren’t, really – in most cases, they are decisions driven by a desire of media creators to leverage diversity to reinvent their brands and expand their markets. But the results ARE political, and by attacking these as bad politics, the outrage junkies are making it clear which politics they prefer – one that leads to a world where straight, white males are the only significant movers and shakers.

Gee, what political movement does THAT sound like?