Because he was trying to make somewhat of a point that the Imperium paints all aliens with the belief that they are evil to prevent defiance from Imperial rule, but it fails when the tabletop factions are explicitly a threat to humanity and especially the orks, who would probably be offended if someone suggested that they could be anything but violent.
Though another reason he chose 40k is because the books he flashed up were from Robert Rath, who has done some writing for Extra Credits. And the guy has written some entertaining 40k, so either the writer for this episode didn’t consult him or just misinterpreted what he said.
James Mendezs Hodes' 40k example failing to support the guest writer's preceding argument makes it all the more puzzling as to why he even picked that example to begin with. Lets go over that particular segment:
So with the foolish notion that it is morally good to play nice with something that just wants you dead, Hodes' argument is that a game's inherently-evil enemies that seek to harm the player no matter what are "blocking the player from further becoming a part of [the game world]." This is to explain why evil races are bad game design. He then brings up 40k to exemplify, but his rationale to cite the game IP as bad design falls apart in a couple of major ways.
First, the 40k novels and RPGs that Hodes broadly mentions are ultimately supplement to the core tabletop wargame, optional reading material for those already well-invested in the hobby and its setting. And even so, I imagine that such hobbyists will usually only read just a small fraction of what Black Library has to offer, focusing on stories that feature the factions they personally collect or otherwise like. For the most part, however, most casual hobbyists will be content with the broad world-building fiction provided by the game rulebooks and codices specific to the factions they collect, otherwise wiki-diving when they want to know more besides. In fact, it is outright unreasonable to expect a hobbyist to have acquired and digested the codex of a faction that is strictly an opponent to him because he doesn't collect it. The typical hobbyist is perfectly fine with the surface-level reason for why his faction would do battle with the other. And with Games Workshop handling the 40k tabletop game and its fiction in this manner for decades, it has long beaten its competitors and even been seeing huge growth over the past half-decade, so how is it an example of bad game design?
Second, from my experience with the expanded 40k fiction relayed by novels and RPGs (about a couple dozen, I'd say), what the writers says about aliens having moral nuance isn't even meaningfully true. The alien factions represented in the tabletop game especially are still all depicted as certain threats to humanity, the galaxy at large being a dark, hostile place with the Imperium of Man being besieged at all sides. Sure, there may be a few one-off examples of aliens that aren't an apparent danger such as the Kinebrach of the Interex as featured in the novel Horus Rising (though their harboring of a Chaos demon weapon in a museum is suspicious), but such aliens are few and incredibly insignificant to the galactic-scale setting and care of the hobbyists.
I was actually wondering why those Necron stories in particular were highlighted in the video since, from what I've heard about them before, they only go to show that the sentient rulers of the Necrons are indeed callously evil. It's news to me, then, that the author Robert Rath is actually on the Extra Credits staff. In light of this information, I think I now understand. I highly doubt that Hodes even meant to highlight any particular 40k stories. Rather, I suspect it was the choice of the video editor to throw up a graphic matching that line in the script, and in being equally ignorant of 40k fiction, he just went with showing works by Rath because the editor knew his coworker has written for Games Workshop. If Rath was ever consulted on this decision, he was probably just happy with the publicity. Twitter queries don't indicate to me that Hodes and Rath are personally acquainted.
For further research into Hodes' familiarity with 40k, I looked into how much he has spoken about it previously, and there doesn't appear to be much.
The second part of his 2019 "Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth" article linked to in the Extra Credits video description says this:
“In this game they’re a stereotype of white people”
… okay, you know what? I don’t hate this one. I think Warhammer 40,000’s Space Orks are one of the only viable large-scale efforts to reframe orcs away from Tolkienian racism. 40K Orks reproduce via weird spores, thus disengaging from uncomfortable sexual narratives. But Games Workshop’s true masterstroke was to code space orks as English football hooligans. Unlike many efforts to rehabilitate orcs by stripping out culture or inventing it wholecloth, GW leans into a completely divergent cultural association, solving orcs’ cultural problem actively rather than passively.
Space Orks still have lots of problems. They’re all coded male, they still run on stereotypes (especially class stereotypes, which can blow back onto some of the same ethnicities as garden-variety orcs), and British football hooligans overlap heavily with far-right nationalists. Also they’re really expensive to collect. Still, I think we can all learn some fascinating lessons about proactively changing fraught narratives from this weird little choice GW probably made because it was funny.
He subsequently
elaborated a little further on Twitter:
Dunno if I'd call [40k Orks] acceptable; like I mentioned, they still run on some harmful engines. But I think they're a good example of how to change ingrained characterization by active choice and leaning into a different culture (in this case English) than the original signifiers.
If you just declare "my version just won't have the problematic stuff" and you don't actively replace that stuff, you tend to fall short. If I ask you to count to 10 w/o thinking of a rabbit, you can't do it on command unless you *actively* think of some other thing.
40K Space Orks actively give us something else to think about: football hooligans. They reduce creepy sexual dimensions because they're fungi. They're not all the way to the orcs I want (yet), but they taught me important lessons about which direction to go.
With this being all I could find on his regard towards 40k (other common keywords turn up nothing on his Twitter account), I can only surmise that Hodes is not personally familiar with the game IP, only regurgitating the simple points he heard from others about Orks (they're spore-grown football hooligans) mainly because they're a blatant counterpoint to his general war against fantasy orcs. And as you can see, even though he doesn't have the in-depth knowledge to call their depiction racist (don't tell him about the Snakebite Klan and the Savage Orcs of Warhammer Fantasy), he ultimately thinks Orks are still unacceptable.
So why did Hodes mention 40k at all when it's unfamiliar to him and does a poor job of aiding his argument that evil races are bad game design? My guess is that he was just looking for an means to complain about 40k no matter what, coinciding with his social circle of internet "cultural critics" long having a bone to pick with 40k because they believe it to be harboring "bad fans." Like how they've been tearing down D&D and tabletop RPGs broadly for years over orc racism and other such nonsense, they want to similarly target 40k, and the mention of 40k in this video provides that avenue: evil races are racist -> 40k has evil races -> 40k is racist
