If you’re basing your understanding of the gaming world on headlines and video titles alone, all you’d know about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster is that a) people sure do love graphics, except b) a small but vocal contingent that can’t get past slightly tweaked gender options and, like, a statue or something. The game is by most measures an enormous success, a testament to the enduringly profitable power of nostalgia. But the gaming world is not the whole world. Oblivion is also a Microsoft product, and the Palestinian-led BDS movement is currently boycotting the company. If only a handful of people are talking about that, though, and it’s not having a tremendous impact on sales, what’s the point? On the latest Aftermath Hours, we discuss why covering and participating in these things still matters.
This week we’re joined by freelance writer Autumn Wright, author of a very good piece that ran on this very site titled Games Media Can’t Ignore BDS Xbox Boycott, to discuss how that’s playing out in practice during the week of both a surprise-ish Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster and an indie dev removing his game from Xbox in solidarity with BDS. How should the press approach coverage of a big Microsoft release in the shadow of genocide? Which coverage is actually necessary versus which serves as glorified marketing? And what can a targeted boycott achieve when taking on a globally entrenched behemoth like Microsoft?
Then we briefly touch on Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders, which went live this week and led to no end of unexpected (and, let’s be real, expected) hassles. Finally, the mailbag forces us to reckon with the follies of our youth.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can someday put on a live show with a line outside comparable to that of one (1) GameStop location on Switch 2 preorder day.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: With Hogwarts Legacy, I think there was more acknowledgement [among the press] of its place within this sphere of potentially funding harm [than with the BDS Microsoft boycott], but then you look at the wider conversation around that game, and it was the press saying, “Hey, I don’t know if buying this is such a good idea,” the anti-wokes turning opposition to that idea into a giant crusade, and then the game selling, like, 13 million copies.
A lot of people who would have cared in either direction didn’t hear about any of this, so it was all not a wash necessarily – there was an impact – but what does that say about the press’ role in all of this? Because you also have people in chat right now saying that their friends don’t read articles; they watch a stream or a video. So much of the conversation around games is happening over there – most of it, even. With that in mind, how important is our role in all of this? How much does our work really impact anything?
Riley: With [Rowling helping fund the war against trans people in the UK] and the Harry Potter TV show, I’ve seen people be upset about all of that, but I haven’t read writeups of it. I don’t know if TV coverage is having the same [sort of moment games publications did around Hogwarts Legacy]. JK Rowling funded something super bad, and it seems like such a clear line, whereas you could argue, if you felt so called, that the line from Hogwarts Legacy to JK Rowling’s hatefulness is less direct. I don’t think you’d be correct. But in this case, it’s like, come on. We just had this thing. I haven’t seen a ton of TV writing about it, but I guess [the show] doesn’t exist yet.
Autumn: I think that’s also gonna change very quickly now, with the news out of the UK last week. I see somebody in chat getting into the weeds of Hogwarts Legacy, of the fact that there was no organized call to boycott, that it was a different kind of boycott. But again, [considering] the broader thing about orienting how we live to get to a world where people don’t live under someone else’s boot, why do you want to engage with Hogwarts Legacy? Have you noticed the amount of antisemitism and classism in there? I don’t mean that to talk down to you, but think about: Why do you have to play that game, specifically?
And if you really do start to dig into it, you will start to see that it is itself creating a world where trans people don’t exist, where people do live under boots, but they’re called house elves, so it’s fine – whatever. So let’s really think about how we’re getting to that. Art does influence the world, and it does tell us who gets to be human in fiction, which then shapes reality, and that shapes politics.
I was reading just this past week The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a fantastic book about what writing and art can do. I recommend it to every writer just to read – really illuminating the actual importance of what we can do. But then we were talking five minutes ago about how writing and art can do all this stuff, but if no one reads it, what’s the point? At that point, I don’t know.
Nathan: My kind of solace is that all of these things can serve as building blocks over time – that if even a handful of people read my things [about the Oblivion remaster or an indie dev removing his game from the Xbox store], that could filter up to other people who maybe don’t internalize all of it, but they carry some seed of it forward, which ends up somewhere else, and over time you have this groundswell of thought or opinion that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
I think we’ve actually seen that with Hogwarts Legacy, in a way. I think there is more open opposition now to JK Rowling than there was even a couple years ago when people were upset about Hogwarts Legacy. The latter almost certainly had a direct impact on the former. So there are some things that you’ve just gotta keep chipping away at, even if your pick is incredibly tiny. You do it because if you’re not doing it, you’re doing nothing, and then nothing happens.
Autumn: You are creating the world you want to live in with very small actions, and that does build out. It makes me think of how, when we talk about the manosphere, people are like “Guys, you’ve gotta tell your friends that the thing they just said is really weird when they say it.” We’re doing that in small ways, by saying it’s weird that you are really invested in this [game] over the material harm that it’s [complicit in]. We should live in a world where we see oppression, and we react to it. We don’t just live with it, and we do take injustice anywhere as a threat to justice everywhere.
