Austin's problem isn't that he thinks all video games have inherently political messages, it's that he approaches this only as how he interprets what he thinks are their messages, which is always the same and that's not only uninteresting, it makes his work a dime a dozen because he shares the same views as all the rest of the game journalists who want to do the same wannabe political punditry but are too afraid to break away from their supposed day job of writing about video games. He's just, at least in my opinion, smarter than most of those other game journalists about these topics. (But to the detriment of his games knowledge.)
He was handed Waypoint to establish a gaming site with that very clear and pointed ideological message to its coverage. And they then just did everything every other site does except every so often they did some stupid "this is problematic and bad and we won't cover it" bullshit instead of actually discussing the politics or message involved. How many times did Waypoint get coverage entirely because of their refusal to actually talk about something. And then one of those instances was when they refused to comment on the shit happening at VICE that was totally into the supposed wheelhouse of their worldview and principles so the whole thing looked even more phony. (Or that time when Danielle whined about how Resident Evil 2, a 20 year old game, didn't let her play it completely differently as a paramedic trying to save minorities instead of shooting zombies.)
Austin could have made it work easily at Giant Bomb by being one of the gang on everything else and then writing his own articles where he did all the wankery bullshit. And maybe they could sometimes talk about those on the podcast. An inverse Dan. But VICE offered him what he actually wanted to do, only for him to discover that wasn't all that fun when everyone else is the same miserable way about games.
