I’m not calling for the entire industry to be fixed, because it’s not broken. They aren’t going anywhere, and they’re only getting better. But I promise you this, fellow gamers: Video games will continue to be important and relevant and amazing, even if they are critiqued. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone-I will shout at those who try to tell me that video games make kids violent. “Sure, the story makes no sense, but look how tight that shooting mechanic is!” “OK, so no woman would actually fight in a thong and two triangles over her nipples-but at least she kicks ass!” We desperately, passionately love the games we love, and we spend hours and hours on them, so we can sometimes get a little defensive when people (specifically people who don’t play video games) attack this thing we’ve devoted so much of our lives to. Gamers, male and female, have grown up making excuses for the games we love. It’s an incredibly diverse world out there, so to say that video games are sexist, violent, or stupid is reductionist and a little lame. Also sometimes you play an octopus who is trying to convince the world he’s a regular dad (see Octodad: Dadliest Catch).

Video game characters used to just be defined by bad dialogue and worse pixelation, and now they are fully fleshed-out personalities that you love, hate, and get to inhabit. It used to be that video game plots were a paragraph in the booklet that came with the game, the method for delivering missions to the player, but these days the narratives are sophisticated and well-written, worthy of any movie. Games like Gone Home, Child of Light, or Journey. Like the film industry, there are huge big-budget video game titles that are fun to play and hit all the familiar gaming tropes-any Call of Duty game, Wolfenstein, the Halo series-and there are tiny indie titles that will completely blow your mind with their approach to what gaming means. This medium is no longer “our secret”-it's a multimillion-dollar industry just as important as TV or movies. But with that comes a modicum of responsibility. We wanted our hobby to be seen as more than just an immature collection of dots that shoot at each other, and we’ve gotten our wish.

We gamers have to start taking this thing we’re passionate about a bit more seriously as a real juggernaut of culture and entertainment. Sure, there have been many instances of sexist, atrocious, mob-like, creepy behavior on the part of game designers, gamers, and journalists, but there are also amazingly progressive, interesting, and radically egalitarian things happening in the industry as well-you just don’t hear those stories as much. To me, nitpicking all the things the industry is doing wrong isn’t creating a better gaming environment for anyone. I promise, this is not going to be another essay about the rampant, multi-headed beast of misogyny that can infect the industry-that’s been done enough, and is such an well-covered issue that there’s little originality to add to the conversation.

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