Probably Wrongly Named, But There’s a No Games for Genocide Movement
Back in October, I mentioned having just learned, with some delay, about the No Music for Genocide movement, the participating artists and labels geo-blocking Israel and removing their music from there. Well, it’s also with months of delay that this evening I just learned that something called No Games for Genocide exists as well. However, rather than being a similar movement, with developers and publishers geo-blocking Israel and removing their games from there, it just asks participants to boycott as many Microsoft products as possible, in response to Microsoft providing the Israeli military with cloud and AI services. They mention intending to boycott other tech companies that are also complicit, at this point mentioning Intel and HP specifically, but for the time being it’s just Microsoft, which does seem like too little for a name like this, and in fact that stated future direction makes me say that they wrongly appropriated the name, seeing as those companies are involved in far more than gaming, which is typically not the first field you think of when you see those names. And with just ten organizations having signed so far, it doesn’t look that it’s getting anywhere anyway.
Still, it’s something, and if this approach won’t work, maybe others will pick up the banner and try to get something that’s actually similar to the No Music for Genocide campaign going for gaming. And maybe other fields will also join in, because I searched and it doesn’t seem like there are even attempts to create other centralized movements along these lines. There are various pledges and actions in other artistic fields, as well as academic ones, but they’re separate, fragmented efforts and usually with a limited scope, while something like this can actually show that there is a movement and those who are interested but may not take action on their own, or at least not publicly, to make a statement, may be encouraged to speak up. And it’s not like there’s any less need to do so, even if other current events, most notably the war with Iran that involves and was perhaps even initiated by Israel more than the US, are taking away even what little of the world’s attention might have still been turned towards the plight of Palestinians.
