No Canon and No Archive: The Inadvertent Controversy of Critical Hits
An anthology of games writing that sounds pretty good made a mockery of its rollout in the eyes of many people that have long struggled to build games criticism as a serious endeavor
The week before Thanksgiving, online literary magazine Electric Literature published an interview by Summer Farah with authors J. Robert Lennon and Cameron Maria Machado, who are editing an anthology of long-form videogame criticism and personal essays. The softball promotional interview revealed harsh feelings from many in the gaming press because of two intertwined, avoidable but not unremarkable perceived slights. Basically, the book is an anthology of games writing by literary storytellers, which is cool, but which ruffled feathers by alledging to be the first of its kind. It shares a name with a previous anthology of games criticism, Critical Hits. What makes these into slights is that the wording of the former bit in the interview makes it sound as though *no* writer has ever worked on a games criticism anthology (“has there ever been a gaming anthology? Writers writing about videogames?”) which feels especially goofy when one with the same name exists.
My introduction to the interview was through irate tweets with screenshots from the piece expressing familiar disappointments, and then a very thorough critical analysis blog about feelings and games criticism history by one of my favorite writers on games and internet culture, Gita Jackson, at their new site Aftermath. I empathize with the angry games critics because I sort of am one (I’ve been paid for reviews and essays about games, if never enough for it to be all I do, whereas my unfinished fiction has garnered no such interest). Extending benefit of the doubt that was in short supply two weeks ago, I can see how this slight, generating annoyance and offense among the online games writing community, could be accidental, in fact is essentially incidental. At the same time, authors of fiction certainly know word choice matters as well as other writers do. The thing is that games writers – and the games industry beyond us – have either been closely witnessing or personally experiencing as friends, colleagues, collaborators, and competitors have been experiencing continuous layoffs for the better part of two years. If we change “continuous” to “constant,” we can probably extend that timeline at least a couple of decades.
As Jackson illustrates in their piece, “The New Games Journalism, Same As The Old Games Journalism,” the process of writers thinking they’re the first to say something about games happens every so often. I feel, personally, that there have been times over the course of human history where, separated by physical or temporal distance or technology (including language), individuals or groups could innocently and earnestly claim to be developing or discovering something which exists elsewhere and that long form criticism of, or personal essays about, videogames in 2023 is not one of those things.1 The claim to novelty seems, at least at first blush in a concise emotional interview, to betray either a lack of curiosity (not hitting Google or JSTOR enough to see it exists in spades including within academic contexts) or a feeling of uniqueness that is easily conflated with, if not necessarily identical to, elitism. I am not saying the collection of fiction writers and poets and literary critics essaying about games think they are better than the critics, editors, and journalists that have been doing this work for years, often times through multiple companies as layoffs and closures occur ad nauseum. I am saying the statements of the editors in an interview claiming to be the first to create such a collection are very easy to read as, generously, a lack of humility.
Aside from the inflamed passions which emerge from perpetual layoff season, the professed ignorance, if not merely incuriosity, speaks to the reach problem that serious writing about games continues to have. This is something Jackson gets at in their blog regarding how seldom these sites last, and has been lamented by Austin Walker in a couple of places, including his recent guest spot on No-Cartridge: the audience for serious games criticism that cares about philosophy or politics, or takes it seriously as literature or art is sizable, but not as sizable as we might like. I have a tendency to presume this is connected to the primacy of the U.S. in the games industry and our nation-state’s culture-wide anti-intellectualism. This is in cycle with our distrust of experts and is connected closely - with games especially and movies to only a slightly lesser extent - to seeing art as disposable and seeing media as a place we go to turn our brains off. The youth of the medium, its primary target audience being young people, the huge budgets at work, its former status as primarily an object of self-proclaimed nerdy outcasts, many of whom are loudly regressive. All of this connects, much of it overlaps, and we have an exacerbated version of the fear of deep, critical thought that is everywhere else in society. It is also connected to the disparate understandings of what a “review” is and what it is for, but I’m going to avoid that argument today, somehow, I think.
It is also perhaps, as Nadia Shammas pointed to, a sign of games being perceived as “low art.” Why would critics of the literary world deign to lower themselves to the level of the criticism of enthusiast presses when they’re already knowledgeable in a better-lauded field? Surely, they have much to teach us and nothing to learn from us. @NonTrotski made similar points in this thread.
Like movies – which have created enough serious art in the 20th century to mostly dodge this assumption now – or comics – which, at least in mainstream eyes, have not – or television – which has done more than comics but less than film – games as a medium are considered to be consumable, disposable trash, toys to be discarded. I don’t want to belabor this point too much, because I don’t want to get caught in the “doth protest too much” of it all.
What is interesting and what I am far from the first to point out is that the aspiration to greater depth of critique and a greater artistic reputation for the medium is that its largest proponents do not truly want it to be critiqued. They think anyone they disagree with is being intellectually or spiritually dishonest. They call reviewers shills while existing in and supporting a media ecosystem where content creators expect to be paid to cover games, which – depending on your viewpoint – either hopelessly blurs the line between critics and advertisers or makes it very bold and clear.
There are many thousands of people that care about games in ways that promote serious and thought-provoking discussion but we are not taken to be the mainstream of gaming or even its intellectual vanguard, because – to quote an all-too-right recent interlocutor – games are toys. Their interactive aspect and pursuit of fun are at their core, and being pursued wrongheadedly can preclude them being taken seriously just as those components intertwine with the profit motive to constrain their artistic daring. This isn’t because “fun” is a bad objective (I try unceasingly to make an idealized version of realistic college football because I find that fun; I am annoyed with space travel in Starfield because it is *not* fun) but because its simplest definition when appealing to as broad as possible a base of consumers is going to narrow what’s worth aspiring to. Corporate stakeholders don’t necessarily want audiences hungering for more artistically complex games, and a loud, wrongheaded minority2 of the quiet, perhaps disinterested consuming majority (most people play games, a disturbing amount of money is spent on games for phones)3 are happy to acquiesce to these circumstances.
This is what I think is distinct from film or literature, where there’s a lot of intentionally disposable product and intentionally or unintentionally disposable criticism, but an acceptance among society at large and thinkers within and without the field that beauty and brilliance and intellectual provocation at least exist within it. You don’t need to adapt a book to a film in order for it to be taken seriously; the adaptation is more likely to water it down at worst or create something wholly new at best through the translation of the medium. Contrast that with the recurring meme of whether *this* film or *that* TV adaptation will be the one to convince its viewers that games are a medium to be taken seriously.
The editors of the new Critical Hits and interviewees in Electric Lit do afford games the description of ‘art,’ and if they weren’t taking it seriously they wouldn’t have bothered to put together a book of long writing about it. Part of all this is derived from the same vocabulary being used for different conversations, as Trevor Strunk wrote in his piece about the dust-up, and something Blood Knife editor-in-chief Kurt Schiller (someone else operating in both worlds) and I coalesced around in discussing the controversy. These are disparate communities, different spheres of reality, entirely different realms of people that make their living with their minds and pens (probably mostly laptops). Or it seems that way to some of us.
My lens on all this is Twitter, where I see a couple of different of these groups brush against each other (games writes and speculative fiction writers, especially, if less – but not no – literary fiction writers) and I’ve also seen in different written and recorded realms of games criticism and adjacent nerd media how a concentrated interest in art products with certain constraints can (not always does) limit the sophistication of one’s taste. I say that to say that there are a lot of ways to have blinders. Or, more bluntly, there are people that I think have brilliant things to say about games that don’t seem to watch much film or television for adults or whose taste I otherwise do not match up with as regards cinema, art, or literature. There are people who I agree with on some things they say about movies and disagree with about others. Such is the nature of the subjective experience of playing games, reading books, watching movies, looking at paintings and sculptures and so forth.
In short, I’m annoyed at a tone of incuriosity and – let’s call it inadvertent – condescension by authors and lit critics about the good work serious and thoughtful critics have done on games because I find it so aspirational, and because I also get annoyed when that incuriosity goes the other way. I wonder if the games crit many of them have encountered – or the editors have encountered – has been low-brow and bland. I see that, or think that, these groups are talking across each other, maybe even – not without exception – being unaware of one another’s existence. For whatever it’s worth, based on Strunk’s review of Critical Hits, I’m probably going to read the book. If it brings more interested parties into reading and writing serious games criticism, it’s probably a net positive. I wonder still if the type of work Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz cover on Game Studies Study Buddies (books about games and play that incorporate philosophy, psychology, sociology, and more) or the type of work produced on sites like Bullet Points (some of the best critical writing on games)4 has yet been recommended to Lennon and Machado. I hope so.
I do not make my living doing art media criticism. It could be called, optimistically, a side hustle of passion projects or, more derisively, a hobby I am sometimes paid for. At the expense of being melodramatic, it can be dispiriting to see the people you look up to, who inspired your interest and your effort (many of whom are much more experienced but not that much older) treated as though they don’t exist, can make you wonder at the preservation and perpetuation of the art of criticism, beyond games, even. Set aside the corniness of my weepy ambitious inner child and consider: if the only people reading literary criticism are literary critics, and the only people reading film criticism are film critics, and the only people regularly reading games criticism are games critics, and the same of comics, of theater and music and paintings and photography and all manner of craft and performance for entertainment and edification (to say nothing of not reading the news or history or philosophy or whatever else), if we’re all in our silos intellectually, then we’re inhibiting ourselves at least and accelerating our extinction at the worst. Iron can’t sharpen iron if it never touches. Self-interest aside, art only gets better (here meaning more interesting and aside from any moral aspirations) if someone is paying attention to it and gives a damn.
Of course it has also been said for at least the last 30 years that the only people seriously reading criticism anymore are the people also producing it5. The same is said of indie comics and of short fiction magazines. And just like it’s worthwhile (critical?) for fans and critics of so-called “low art” to read criticism of art that’s conventionally considered more sophisticated or important or regardless of value judgments different, it’s good for the sophisticates to try to find some of the tremendous work already done on vulgar media if it’s work they want to do.6
I tweeted almost that exact same thing. Like pretty close.
“capital-G Gamers” is the term I occasionally use, but there’s also “Gamer Bro”
286.5bn in global market revenue, and apparently 51% of all gaming revenue, according to Statistica
There are a ton of sites and podcasts I could put here, and more I will reference in the future. FWIW, I really liked Bullet Points’s Metal Gear anthology, Okay, Hero
Maybe much longer than that, but here’s Richard Corliss’s “All Thumbs,” from a 1990 issue of Film Comment; as aforementioned, this is a frequent concern in conversations about serious games criticism.