E3 Retweets Moderately Sexist Thing, Apologizes

It can be hard, being part of the games industry and feeling powerless as you watch different companies get called out for being sexist. Feeling like there’s nothing you can do as more and more awful stuff are drudged up about them. Well, E3 has decided that enough is enough – no longer content to merely watch from the sidelines, yesterday they decided to join the fray and do something sexist themselves so they can have their already tattered brand dragged through the mud some more.

Granted, it’s nothing as bad as Ubisoft or Rocksteady have been accused of; rather, they just pulled a social media blunter and retweeted the wrong article.

The tweet, which has since been removed, linked to an article called “The Games We Play! 25 Online Game That Women Enjoy.” Okay, could be harmless enough, but when you actually click the article it’s a little bit… sexist? It leads with “Girls love gaming just as much as men,” which is already a pretty loaded statement, and it continues to get worse from there.

While the list itself was fine, featuring games from different genres and such, the comments for each game weighed heavily on reinforcing stereotypes. It’s not so much that it was overtly sexist per se, it was just rather tasteless and old-fashioned and more than a little questionable for something like E3 to be retweeting uncritically.

Regardless, it only took an hour for E3 to realize it had made a mistake, and shortly afterward they apologized. Likewise, the article itself has been removed to the best of our knowledge, but to be honest, no one’s really looking for it that hard.

Maybe at a different time, something like this could have been brushed off or ignored. But with the gaming industry’s archaic attitude towards half the population becoming more prevalent – and disturbingly iconic – this was a bad case of failing to read the room.