The real problem here is that it's the internet. We've probably all been here long enough to realize that we're willing to go to much larger depths with pretty much every single issue than we'd be willing to in real life. Take the whole Mario Kart 8 thing. Is the observation true? Yes. That game does have a racist element to it. Now, what the internet does is take that observation and make it into an issue. The truth is this: Every piece of fiction, be it a novel, a film, a game, whatever, is going to have an element that discriminates against someone by their omission. This sucks. These people who are going to be discriminated against are more often than not going to be minorities within the culture producing said piece of fiction. I'm a middle class, white, straight male. Most of the people I know are middle class, white, and straight. I'm currently writing a crappy novel, which I instinctively populated with white, straight people who happen to behave the way the middle class does. I didn't do this intentionally, it's just what happened to occur to me because of how I lived my life.
This is an unfortunate trait of human behaviour: in creative work, we are drawn to that which we know and like. Since most people making games are, much like I am, white, straight males, we can expect to see a lot of stuff going out that would appeal to white, straight males. The fact that everyone else gets shafted sucks. I would love to see more works that are for demographics other than my own.
Re-reading what I wrote, I realize it sounds like I'm suggesting a kind of "fictional segregation", where each race and sexuality has their own fiction to consume exclusive to them. That's not at all what I mean, I'm just trying to point out where the issue comes from. Now, this has been true pretty much since fiction has existed, but the problems that this forum is so fond of discussing has only really been discussed relatively recently. This is greatly part to an evolution in society in realizing that, hey, white straight males are not the only type of people out there. But I think there's a big influence from the internet here as well. I think people seem to assume that a lack of a certain demographic within a work is immediately a form of bigotry. This is not the case, as I've explained earlier. It's just a natural thing that will happen in any creative work.
Now, another big issue is the misrepresentation of certain groups, women in videogames in particular being a big topic on the internet. Now, I can't deny there's a big issue there: women are certainly not presented as well as they should be. The reason this whole "Social Justice Warrior" thing has come up recently is the effect of the internet of people. Let's look at the Far Cry 4 box art controversy, simply because it's the most recent and the one that's probably most fresh on everyone's mind. Now, it's absolutely true, if the character on the cover is supposed to be the hero (which I thought it was evident he was not, but that's irrelevant), that is most certainly a racist piece of cover art. It's no longer in the "we're not including a certain race" territory, it's actively putting down asians. The normal reaction in face to face conversation to something like this would be "Hey, that's kind of racist. I don't like that, I won't buy the game", or something along those lines, followed by a short discussion, and then moving on.
But then the internet comes along, where instead of a couple sentences in the middle of a conversation that flows around different topics, your remark turns into a decently long forum post on a thread dedicated to the topic. For you, it's just that one post. Possibly someone will answer, and you'll then reply and that'll be that, but it's just a few hundred words at most. If it's something that becomes particularly engrained in on-line culture you might bring it up as an example when something similar happens a few months down the line, but you're really not talking about it that much.
Then, along comes one of these people complaining about "Social Justice Warriors". This person isn't racist or sexist or homophobic, necessarily, but they don't really care about social justice, they're just here to talk games. They might not really realize just how deep the issues are, or the fact that by saying Far Cry 4 looks racist you're not trying to say everyone who is excited about it is a bad person. They see your one post about this issue. But they also see the other hundred posts in the thread. And they see that there's threads like this all over the internet, with tonnes and tonnes of posts. You just said a thing and moved on, but to them it's everyone saying the thing, everywhere, and they clomp everyone who ever pointed out into a mass of people who they think just want to spoil their fun.
They don't. We "social justice warriors" love games as much as anyone else. Sure Dragon's Crown was quite sexist. I still enjoyed the hell out of it.
TL, DR:
The joint complaints of everyone on the internet make it look like everyone is completely outraged about something that very few, if any at all, people are really that offended by individually.
