The minute I saw that Vice branched out to Vice Gaming, I was thrilled. Vice is a lot of things: Vice Magazine started in Canada in 1994 and quickly gained a reputation for having politically incorrect, provocative content. In 2002, the British edition of Vice was started, and by 2007 there were around 14 different foreign versions of the irreverent news source. In 2012, some started calling the hodgepodge Vice Media, though that still remains unconfirmed. Soon, online and television versions of Vice began, this time gaining reputation for something else: going where no one wanted to go, going where it was dangerous, publishing articles that went against typical “American” values. They humanized our enemies in Iraq, they exposed the Baptist “Gun School,” they interviewed the real people impacted by international events, and they called into question narratives the popular media told us: child soldiers, the Tohoku earthquake and nuclear explosion, the rising oceans. In short, their earlier days of being “politically incorrect” morphed into something new, and something amazing. They became “incorrect” in that they told stories no one was telling, giving a voice to those who were otherwise silenced.
So Vice Gaming? HOLY SHIT YES. In practice? Not so much. Vice Gaming seems not to have found its voice or its angle. They switch between game reviews, meta-essays on the state of gaming, personal reflection, news, interviews, and a few other things. This in and of itself isn’t a problem, though I personally think we have enough sites that try to do “everything” and end up with little usable or interesting content, and what content they do have is buried so far you’d never find it (remember when Kotaku used to be interesting?). When Vice Gaming is posting so many different things every day without rhyme or reason (their website is organized as a gallery, without topics or tags that I can see), you’re really encouraged to just read the headlines and click around. That might be fine, but in an industry that needs Vice so badly, it’s disappointing.
Yesterday as I was formulating this post in my head, Vice Gaming posted a wonderful article on diversity in games (though really, it was first posted in Vice UK). This article was so good because it doesn’t stop at critiquing representation of avatars in video games. Instead, the author pinpoints the problem at the lack of diversity for those making the games. This is an often overlooked problem that popular gaming sites miss: that the problem isn’t (only) that you have no female playable characters. That is a symptom of a larger problem that there is very little diversity behind the scenes of games. This is the kind of article we need Vice for, even if it isn’t about diversity or inclusion. This is the type of thinking, not accepting the surface and not ripping games apart, but claiming loudly that they can be better.
Why is Vice burying its decent content among so much crap? Vice Gaming has authors that at least touch on the tough topics: Anita Sarkeesian, poorly written protagonists, writing characters outside your identity, and several on the future of games. But embedded in the majority of their articles is a shying away from real, controversial issues. 70% of the articles so far are personal reflections. Fine, that’s needed in games. But why not engage with the news, issues, and problems facing gaming as a whole? Why so tentative? As far as I can tell, Vice Gaming employs 2 female writers, with 1 other making a guest post towards the beginning of the publication. These female writers are responsible for roughly 8% of the articles. Congratulations, Vice Gaming, you’ve somehow managed to have even less female representation than the gaming industry. Quite the feat I must say.
As far as Vice Gaming’s reputation? One poster put it best: “Glad you guys made this page the rest of your retarded liberal brethren are pissing me off.” Good job, Vice Gaming, your posts, articles, and exposés on gaming have fallen so far outside the human-centered and truth-seeking that the rest of Vice is known for that you’ve garnered a whole new audience: conservative, closed-minded bigots. You’ve done exactly what nearly every other mainstream game news and articles site has done: pander to an audience that pretends to be the voice of gaming (through talking loudly and threatening others who speak and try to change gaming for the better). Awesome.
Let me be utterly clear about one thing: I don’t hate Vice Gaming because I hate Vice or because I hate games. I hate Vice Gaming because I LOVE both of those things so much. I thought, this is it. This is going to be the mainstream news source that will overturn the industry. I desperately wanted them to be the voice of the silenced, to dig into those unpopular questions, to bring to gaming what they brought to everything else they’ve conquered. But instead, we get interviews with guys who mod games so they can jack off to naked video game characters. I’m going to drown myself in tears now.
