Welcome to On Video Games

An Introduction to this Newsletter and my Critical Philosophy

What This Is

This is a blog (newsletter? email?) about video game topics from a game developer, aimed primarily at other game developers. 

I plan on running a number of new pieces, as well as re-running with revisions a number of well-received pieces that I published as an “expert blogger” on Gamasutra.

Why This Exists

In “Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting” Ted Gioia wrote:

Imagine, for a moment, football commentators who refuse to explain formations and plays. Or a TV cooking show that never mentions the ingredients. Or an expert on cars who refuses to look under the hood of an automobile.

These examples may sound implausible, perhaps ridiculous. But something comparable is happening in the field of music journalism. One can read through a stack of music magazines and never find any in-depth discussion of music. Technical knowledge of the art form has disappeared from its discourse. In short, music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting.

A variation on this, to lesser degree, exists in modern game criticism. These blogs are my attempt to “be the change you want to see” - to contribute positively to the critical landscape.

That’s the short explanation. The rest of this piece is about the state of game criticism in some detail, rather than about game design itself - if that’s not interesting I suggest you stop reading now and come back when the first “real” piece is up. (Or maybe skip to the end to find out what incredible benefits you get for subscribing)

“Where is All The Good Games Crit?”

Every so often someone writes a polemic centered on this question, rehashing familiar talking points to chide us all about the state of games criticism: “it’s just reviews, there’s no post-release analysis.” Game criticism is just buyer’s guides, it’s immature, it doesn’t exist to any real degree, it’s just PR and marketing - it’s people saying “the graphics on level 3 need work.” 

This is an appealing take minus one problem: it’s not accurate. The people asking where the good games criticism is typically can’t be bothered to look - finding examples of good criticism would get in the way of a fiery take.

So I’m not going to say that good games criticism doesn’t exist, and that I alone am brave and talented enough to fix that. But it’s a mistake to say that games crit is great, or as good as it’s ever been. An eyes-wide-open assessment of games criticism leaves much of it wanting.

In “The New Games Journalism” Kieron Gillen wrote:

“No matter what the precise form this tradition takes, it works off a single assumption; that the worth of a videogame lies in the videogame, and by examining it like a twitching insect fixed on a slide, we can understand it.

New Games Journalism rejects this, and argues that the worth of a videogame lies not in the game, but in the gamer.”

Video game intelligentsia praised this take but I find it unfortunate. Given our 2021 understanding of fanbases, gamer culture, etc, the deification of the gamer has aged very poorly. But beyond that this is an incurious and ego-centric take - when a game critic says what matters is the player they often mean “what matters is me.” 

(This feels like a good time to mention the following: if you’re a critic of any kind, and you believe that criticism is valuable, you must necessarily believe that criticism of your criticism is also valuable, and be willing to take your lumps alongside everyone else)

He goes on to say:

“Our job is to describe what it’s like to visit a place that doesn’t exist outside of the gamer’s head — the gamer, not the game, remember. “

My philosophy is different. When you write about a work, even if you strive to be dispassionate and “objective”, it’s impossible to escape your own perspective. Every work of critical assessment is opinion and filters through the lens of the author. Ideally it’s not “just” opinion - it’s informed and educated opinion based on thoughtfulness, solid arguments and research - but ultimately it is opinion. Every critic writing about a piece is also writing about themselves. Which to me means there’s no need to lean heavily into that - it’s already unavoidable.¹

I don’t think “the gamer” or the critic is nearly as interesting as the work or the author. The “worth” of “Scary Movie 2” (call me a simpleton but I love this movie) is scenes like the one where Brenda says “this is a skeleton - this is bones!” Someone wrote that line, Regina Hall delivered it with gusto, some prop people made a ridiculous-looking skeleton. The “worth” of that scene isn’t that a guy named Chet sitting on his couch at home watching laughed - there is absolutely nothing interesting about Chet’s story. (Yes, I realize that in some sense the critic, AKA me, is Chet)

The place the gamer visits is created by the game. It’s a product of intentional authorship. A movie critic can write “I laughed, I cried - it was a rollercoaster of emotion.” But that says more about the critic than the film itself. “At some parts I was happy, and at other parts sad” isn’t valuable criticism - that’s the take of a child, not of a critic. The more interesting take delves into the why: why did the movie produce this response? Is it the acting? The storyline? The dialogue? A critic who says a Jackie Chan movie has “thrilling action scenes” is saying basically nothing. A critic who says the action is thrilling because the stunts look real, with physical stakes not just for the characters but for the actors, is onto something.

Dissecting the insect is valuable. But it’s hard. It’s much easier to write “pleasing visuals” than to describe what about them is pleasing, or to complain about “uninspired level design” without considering how an inspired design would differ. 

Even as a developer it can be hard to describe, and understand, how a game is producing an effect. I’ve picked up “Samus Returns” a couple of times and dropped it - “it’s just not grabbing me.” But why isn’t it? I’m not sure - I have some ideas but I’m still sorting through them. Sorting through those ideas, and then articulating them to the audience, is to me the goal of the critic. That doesn’t rule out personal experience in favor of “objective” analysis. It’s rooted in the critic’s inescapable personal perspective - but the focus is less on “here’s what I felt” and more “here’s why I felt this way, due the particular construction of the work.”

There’s a lot of games crit out there and some of it’s good. I don’t look down on game reviews as not real criticism - reviews serve a valuable purpose and game reviewing as a whole seems fine to me. (It’s certainly far better than TV reviewing, which is embarrassingly awful) Certain types of criticism exist in large supply - “cultural criticism” and extremely topical criticism, for example. But the type of criticism I write, and that I like to read, is sparse.

There’s a lack of vitality around this sort of writing. Maybe it’s because this sort of work used to appear largely on personal blogs and personal blogging is not much of a thing anymore. There isn’t a large commercial market for in-depth reviews of craft, and they take lots of time and effort to write. It’s a mistake to say that games crit is bad, or never existed, or whatever rhetorical hand grenades people want to lob out. But to claim that close textual readings and in-depth looks at craft are rare seems fair. I’m looking for it - at mainstream corporate sites, personal blogs, alt magazines, critical roundup websites. If this sort of crit is out there it’s well-hidden.

For and By Game Developers

I’m a game developer and I write wearing that hat. I also write for a game developer audience. That doesn’t mean you should stop reading if you aren’t one - I try to avoid jargon and fancy designer-speak. I’m never going to write a paragraph about “multiple affordances.” (If I had a SFW image of someone jerking off I’d put it here) But it does mean a few things:

I consider readers peers - competent professionals who know their stuff. As such I’m not interested (or qualified) in teaching people gamedev pro tips or dispensing advice. There are some subjects that I might know more about than you or have thought about more than you - or perhaps I just have a different and interesting perspective. Not much that I write is supposed to be actionable - the pitch here isn’t that each piece you read will “level you up” as a game developer and give you a new practical skill.

As a game developer writing for game developers I’m particularly concerned with craft - examining the how and why a game accomplished something, or failed to accomplish it. Understanding craft is good for creators!

In the previous section I did some bashing of a certain style of game criticism. But there are limits on how far writing for consumers should delve into craft. Instead of “visceral combat” I’d prefer to read “the combat produces huge gushes of blood, alongside a robust dismemberment system, leading to a visceral feel” - but expecting a game reviewer to spend 3 paragraphs on the particular implementation of that dismemberment system is silly and wouldn’t service the reader. But that would be appropriate here because it does service my reader.

What you Get For Your Money

What do you get when you hand over your zero dollars and subscribe to my newsletter? First, I don’t intend to ever charge. If you’d like to leave a tip feel free, but also feel free to give that money to some person or cause that needs it. I’m not even sure if tipping is a thing Substack supports and I don’t intend to look into it. 

I don’t intend to spam people with emails. 

I’m going to post a mix of new content and updated blogs that ran on Gamasutra. Those blogs will be “remastered” - if you cringed reading that rest assured I cringed writing it. Hopefully I won’t turn the guns into walkie-talkies - I’d like to clean up the formatting, find better pictures, rephrase some things that were unclear or awkward. But not make fundamental changes or surreptitiously edit with the benefit of hindsight. These will be the best versions of these existing blogs, not “New and Improved.” 

The new content will hopefully be more frequent than once every 8-16 months - I’m going to reign in some of my tendencies to edit things forever - turn every dash into a properly HTML-formatted em-dash (This is a real thing I did and it took hours!)

The world has enough hastily written takes, and enough people who only either write tweets or write “real” work that may as well be. I still plan on writing composed pieces, not reactions. When I took a creative writing class in college what stuck with me most is that in short fiction every word can be carefully chosen. If you’re writing a nine-book fantasy epic two of the middle books can be messy and pointless, but if you’re writing a five page story you can and should engineer each word for maximum effect. That’s how I view what I write here - it can be the best possible version of my thoughts and myself. The most carefully considered, most thoughtful and most well-expressed. I wrote “Against Accessibility” knowing that the topics it broached needed care. The “take” version of that, the kind you’d read as a series of tweets or a hastily penned editorial, serves no purpose. It’s a tricky topic that can careen off the rails into ranting or rehashing. If you’re going to write criticism, and especially if you’re going to challenge conventional wisdom, be a bit contrarian, or wade into fraught territory, you have to bring your A-game. And that’s what I intend to do - or to try. The reader can judge the result.

That may sound a little arrogant and fancy - TL;DR I’m doing my best out here! Your mileage may vary.

If you want to subscribe press that button below, and maybe once a month or so you’ll have a message from me in your inbox. And if you want to tell your friends (I don’t know what that link does, it was there when I got here) I guess press that!

If you’d like to know what you’re getting into you can check out one of my Gamasutra blogs, like Dark Souls: It's Like an NES Game! But again I plan on re-running improved versions of these so don’t spoil yourself too much.

In the meantime, tell your friends!

1. Of course highly personal criticism focused on the author is perfectly valid and fine in some instances - it’s a style with merit. But to elevate it as new and improved games journalism is weak, especially when that sort of writing is so often poor and an excuse for the author to wax eloquent about themselves while barely examining the work itself