The subject of games criticism is such a juicy topic it should be split off into its own thread. In the meantime I have thoughts too and I’ll try to type some of them out before I tire of the exercise.
TGQ came about at an interesting time. For me personally (har har) I was just a young creative person who liked writing and writers and reading books written by writers and journaling and reading other people’s journals and documenting and trying to contextualize my own personal narrative in real time while it was happening. And I liked playing video games too and they were at one of those cultural moments where people who like video games were like “See this is legitimate stop telling me to grow up!” and there was enough really cool stuff going on at the time that it seemed like anything could happen in games.
Budgets weren’t absurdly high yet so there was still room for mid-tier developers to experiment and try out new concepts and things no one else was trying. 3D was still early and all the standards hadn’t been set yet, there was not yet a series of best practices for what to do with lots of the problems of game development like how to work the camera or whatever.
At the same time and unbeknownst to myself was that during a cultural moment there is also an aspect of cultural war. This expressed itself in the immediate backlash we experienced where people accused us of being psuedo-intellectual, navel-gazing, and etc. Maybe I was all those thing but maybe I was also just a kid having fun doing a thing with my friends and letting the world in on it. I later learned the backlash came primarily from people who considered all of academia as being a breeding ground for communism, homosexuality and all sorts of otherwise so-called “deviant” behaviors.
I was just caught up in the middle of one crowd trying to legitimize themselves to mainstream society and then another part of that crowd who was insistent that the only way to do that was to treat a video game purely as a consumer product and not an object worthy of critical thought because anything else might eventually lead to criticism of capitalism or whatever.
The discourse on video games as somehow a “legitimate” art form (in the eyes of whom I’m not sure. Pop culture? Mainstream society? Are game critics not part of those things?) really peaked for me with klikbeep’s (I forget his real name I’m sorry klikbeep) article on Gaming’s Missing Kane forcing forum goers and game likers everywhere to stop and question themselves on just what is the Citizen Kane of video games? The video game that does for the medium what Citizen Kane did for film, namely use all the tricks and techniques developed thus far to make something truly transcendent for it’s time. A work that goes beyond the prior works.
I don’t think that game has been made yet. There are some really great games, with really fun mechanics and pretty good stories but none of them are what I would consider transcendent of the medium.
That’s what avenue where games criticism of today would have to explore. It’s an inescapable issue in my opinion. In addition to all that you still the culture war where such criticism has to constantly justify it’s own existence. As well as the other sorts of writing about things like what even is a game and what is fun exactly and all that sort of stuff.
But since that moment of the conversation video games have just kind of… gone on and continued. Stuff was really creative until it got too expensive to produce and then things just kind of settled into where we are now. And in an age where you can just watch a video of someone playing literally the entire game the day it comes out who needs a consumer review to know whether or not a game is worth their time?
As for criticism: It’s still produced and consumed by people who are interested enough to seek it out. That’s just not the mainstream popular culture audience. There is obviously a market there for it (there’s a market for chocolate covered grasshoppers come on) but if someone wanted to try and capitalize that market and make it affect the mainstream culture it would take I think decades of a concerted effort on the part of hundreds or thousands of people in multiple communities producing a multitude of types of content (video and written, primarily, but you could also do like a performative sketch comedy type thing as well really your own imagination is the only limit) and supporting each other despite their various (guaranteed) differences because the culture warriors of the world will never go away and just leave kids in peace to have fun in public.
