Earlier today, I was casually perusing the internet for gaming news when I noticed something unusual. Google News – arguably the world’s most popular mainstream news aggregator – does not have a video games section. At all.
What gives, Google?
Even if you’re not a gamer, it can’t be denied that the video games industry is kind of a big deal. Hell, Fornite alone accounted for about 98 per cent of all news stories in 2019. (I exaggerate, but you get the picture.)
Despite its huge impact on entertainment and modern culture, Google doesn’t seem particularly interested in this topic, if Google News is anything to go by. Currently, the aggregator site’s default settings don’t contain a Games category. It doesn’t even have a Games subcategory. No, really.
Google News’ Entertainment section is broken down into the subsections Movies, Music, Television, Books, Art and Celebrity. Under Technology, the options are Mobile, Gadgets, Internet, Artificial Intelligence, Computing and Virtual Reality. Apparently, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR are the only gaming topics Google thinks you care about.
Now granted, most people don’t use Google News’ subcategories to find stories. And it’s relatively easy to tailor results to match your favourite topics.
Nevertheless, it still seems like a weird oversight. Like, are people really more interested in books than video games? More to the point, are books more news worthy than video games? (That was a rhetorical question. Of course they’re not.)
Personally, I think one of Google’s New Year resolutions should be to add a games section to Google News. And to stop being an unstoppable mega corporation intent on hoovering up all our personal data. Either one of those is fine with us, really.
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