Greg Costikyan recently wrote an article demanding “Game Criticism” with the corresponding urge that reviews aren’t game criticism. He certainly has his detractors, and those in the industry who agree with him. Some think we don’t need it at all, and some believe that we already have it (and perhaps need more). You can get a good snapshot of that just reading the post that sparked the controversy, Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren’t It

Greg’s article is controversial, occasionally foul, and emotional. He is a known pot-stirrer, claiming the industry is ‘dead’ or dying, and usually has some talk or rant this time of year. He stirs up a controversy and gets his real aim– getting people to think about and talk about whatever it is that concerns him. In his defense, Manifesto Games, an indie game publisher/portal is the direct result of one of his rants, and he’s one of the founders; so he’s put his money where his mouth is.

I’ve read his article, and for a variety of reasons, I agree with him about the need for criticism. I think it’s a complicated topic however. I’m going to try to cover the topic as completely as I can over the next few weeks. But first we need to answer a tricky question, and that is: What is Game Criticism.

You could read Greg’s post, and take his definition, but I don’t fully agree with it. I believe he’s set up a fall dichotomy between reviews and criticism. But to properly understand that, and to understand what game criticism looks like (and will look like), and to answer the question raised by Greg’s blog post, we first have to know what it is.

First day of class in any college course: Define the topic that we are about to discuss. It didn’t work in my science fiction class, and it might not work here, but in both cases, I think we’ll have a better understanding of the topic by the end of the day.

In this day and age, the first place I go to understand something is Wikipedia. Academics are split on whether it’s an authoritative resource or not, but then my English teachers always told me that I couldn’t reference an Encyclopedia in my essays. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is a good place to go to start asking good questions.

A quick search on “game criticism” turns up nothing, with the mostly likely link being video game journalism. “Video game journalism,” Wikiepedia states, “is a branch of journalism concerned with the reporting and discussion of video games … typically based on a core reveal/preview/review cycle.” This pretty accurately sums up the current state of the game enthusiast press. The magazines make deals with the publishers for exclusive stories about a particular upcoming game, reveal some details, eventually score a preview which is usually all positive and then finally review the game with results that can vary wildly from the
previews. I’m reasonably certain that this sort of behavior: the normal workings of the enthusiast press are what Greg is railing against in his article, although he goes much further than condemning this sort cycle.

Wikipedia’s article goes on to talk about “New Games Journalism” which is a branch of games journalism that is strongly inspired by the New Journalism movement of people like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Truman Capote. It focuses on using personal details and first-person experiences to inform, enlighten and entertain. Always Black has a decent example of what I’m talking about in the EVE diaries there, although there are better examples online. And this form of writing has been around since the advent of multi-user spaces, and comprise a lot of the “gaming moments” which users share with each other.

Is this, perhaps, the criticism that we seek? Or is it something else entirely?

I turned my browser to the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the sort of criticism Greg is talking about, namely literary criticism. This, of course, has a sizable entry on Wikipedia, which defines it as “the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.” It goes on to discuss literary theory, which informs literary criticism. Literary criticism, then, could be seen as being about an individual work, and literary theory about literary works, in general (or a subset of works). Others seen no real difference between the terms.

Film criticism sees a similar division. Here, though, it’s not about the work, or film, in question that divides theory from criticism, but rather the academic quality of the critical work. Popular film critics — those whose works appear in most every newspaper, many magazines and online are thus merely reviewers. Those producing “lit crit” type work are film theorists.

This is an important distinction to make, since film reviewing and game reviewing are very similar activities. A film reviewer will watch the film, and write up a short piece that lets you know the general merits or demerits of a film and advise you on some scale whether it’s worth your time and money to view. Game reviewers do largely the same thing, although their perspective may not be wholly appropriate for all games. Using film terminology, Game reviewers are game critics — their works are game criticism.

This seems to beg the question however. To me, it seems that the academia of “film theorists” is trying to separate itself form the more common works of “film critics” by invoking the idea of film theory. I’m sure that there is film theory about groups of films, genres, styles and the role of film as a whole that don’t correspond to the kinds of works that fall into “literary criticism.” To be fair, there are those in the literary world who see no difference in literary criticism and literary theory. However, to my mind, these terms can be usefully separated, especially when we turn to games in specific.

We can thing of a “game review” as work which delineates the merits of a particular game, with at least one of its goals to be purchase advice. Thus a game reviewer is a guide who attempts to highlight games which we would enjoy the most, much like a film reviewer does with film.

A “game critic” then, and the work of game criticism is a piece which studies, discusses, evaluates and interprets a video game. This could be a very slight distinction, to my mind, as a game review must discuss and evaluate the game. Perhaps studying is also required — certainly at the very least playing the game is required. It could be argued that game critic could critique a game based on watching it being played, whereas this probably wouldn’t be tolerated from a reviewer; either way study, of some sort, is necessary.

A game theorist then, is more interested in looking at groups of games, and the patterns that evolve from them. There are a lot of people doing this, creating game theories of interaction and narrative; defining how to make games ‘fun’, or compelling. And this is why I think the film theory term is odd, because certainly film has techniques like these that fall into the theory of film that is taught to students who want to learn to make film. The main difference between the game efforts here and those of film are the several decades that film has existed longer than video games.

Greg Costikyan argues that reviews as buyers guides places them strongly outside the realm of criticism. He points to a higher level of criticism, something more rarefied. This certainly exists inside the literary community, but is largely unaccessible to those who weren’t English majors in college. At the same time a “film reviewer” like Roger Ebert has more to say about films than just a simple thumbs up/thumbs down view. He certainly makes an effort to study films, and interpret them, to place them in the context of society even while he reviews them for a popular audience.

I’ve certainly read game reviews that meandered into game criticism and into game theory as well. There seems to me no reason to suggest that these are mutually exclusive tasks; reviews can be criticism. More difficult are reviews and criticism — that ideally deal with a single work — that becomes theory, dealing with multiple works. But theory is a bit beyond my scope.

So what is gram criticism? A critical work would have to do more than just evaluate a piece based on a recommendation for purchase or rental or total avoidance. It has to interpret the meaning of the piece within some context — other games, society, or the theme or message of the work.

Not all games are going to be open to (easy) criticism — what is the social context and theme of Tetris, for example? Alternatively, most modern games have enough texture to say something about. What does The Sims say about consumerist culture? What do guilds in World of Warcraft say about the self-identification of groups, and how they interact with others? These are the types of questions that criticism can deal with, and are typically beyond the scope of a simple review.

In later works we’ll look at more of these kinds of questions, and see what criticism can bring to games, and if it’s even appropriate for games (obviously I think so, but there are others who disagree.) Also we’ll talk a bit more about the perils of literary criticism and the insular nature of “the canon.”