What's Wrong with Writing on Games

Case studies in misguided Mixtape criticism

I regularly toy with a “What’s Wrong with Writing on Games” post but without specific examples it’s too vague, and with specifics it’s too mean.

So thank you to Kaile Hultner for giving me an out with their hater’s review of Mixtape. And for posting this:

if you’ve got a problem with my mixtape post the only currency I will accept in this exchange is if you start a blog and write a whole ass article countering mine. none of this skeet shit. grow up get a job you like etc

Challenge accepted.

But I’m not just going to review another person’s Mixtape post. That would be silly.

I’m going to review three others as well.

On Mixtape (2026) by Cameron Kunzelman, What year is Mixtape even supposed to take place anyway? by Giovanni Colantonio and I Don’t Know Who Mixtape is For by Luke Plunkett.

Should this get back to the authors, I hope they take this in the intended spirit: pointed but not personal.

I should enjoy Mixtape pushback. I like a good takedown. But these are frustrating. Full of discourse for the sake of discourse, misguided criticism, bad writing about Mixtape, and just straight-up bad writing. Confused, flabby, lifeless.

This is not a defense of Mixtape. It’s not really about Mixtape, and doesn’t engage with Twitter controversies. This is about video game criticism, where it lacks, and liberal use of a red pen.

This one is for the English majors.

Review: Mixtape

Right off the bat we’re in trouble:

I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9.

…

I have made it clear on-record in the past that I do not fuck with Beethoven and Dinosaur’s output. I thought The Artful Escape sucked on toast.

…

It turns out that Beethoven and Dinosaur are even more predictable than I held out hope for and they deserved to be put in a box the entire fucking time.

This is full-on Gawker-style “voicey” writing that’s been stale for years.

It’s one thing to hate a game after playing it. But the author appears to hate the developer, and was determined to hate Mixtape before playing it.

Their social media is clarifying:

I think the problem that I have with shit like Mixtape is the same problem I had with hipsters in the 2000s and 2010s.

It's claiming to love certain music or fashion or artistic trends *solely as* aesthetic sensibility.

I saw people saying they thought the music selection in Mixtape was weirdly random - nope, that's literally just what hipsters listened to 10-15 years ago, pretty much solely as a class signifier.

So, to be clear: the developer’s founder, Johnny Galvatron — who named himself after a Transformer — pretends to like songs from The Transformers animated film to cement his status among the upper crust. He really committed to the bit!

This author has placed an imagined version of Galvatron into a box labelled “hipsters to loathe.” Hultner has invented a certain type of guy to hate.

On a Certain Type of Guy

There’s no way around this: Mixtape uses nostalgia as a bludgeon to beat players to death with. There is a specific Type Of Guy whose presence is overrepresented in games media for whom this game is basically catnip. It is meant to trigger emotions so powerful in that specific Type Of Guy that when they write or talk about it, they frame the bill of goods that Mixtape is selling as the universal growing up and coming-of-age experience, that it is so authentic and classic and true-to-life that surely everyone who has ever lived has experienced, or wanted to experience it.

There’s a Type of Guy who likes games like Mixtape and will praise them unduly.

Using Type of Guy is clever in that everyone can imagine their own type of guy. “Tourist” reviewers or “fake gamers” or “fake geek girls” or “woke reviewers” or “Gen X” or “millennials” or whatever their particular boogeyman is.

It’s clever and cowardly.

Jeff Gerstmann is an older white guy. Is he the certain Type of Guy who likes Mixtape? Well he didn’t like it.

Here’s who did like it:

Urko Miguel of Areajugones. Tyler Treese of PlayStation LifeStyle. Paulo Roberto Montanaro of PSX Brasil. Kimberly Mae Go of Sirus Gaming.

Is Kimberly Mae Go a certain Type of Guy?

Khalief Adams says it’s “one of the best games of this generation.” Is he a certain Type of Guy?

I use examples in my writing because it’s intellectually honest. If I claim “games today are failing because of woke” those inclined to agree will agree but there’s little to push back on as it’s so vague. If I claim “Marathon and Highguard suffered due to woke” someone can retort with “I played both and there’s not much woke there.” That’s a real discussion.

It's seductive to believe a pernicious Type of Guy exists, or that some games are “game journalist games.” Game journalists like easy content-tourism games like Dispatch. But they also like Hollow Knight. It’s complicated.

I can’t counter that a nefarious Type of Guy exists because I don’t know who we’re talking about. Name names or describe them in earnest.

Are Cameron Kunzelman, Giovanni Colantonio, Luke Plunkett and Kaile Hultner not the type of guys (gender notwithstanding) overrepresented in games media?

“Sounds About White” as Serious Criticism

In a vacuum, this soundtrack seems perfectly anodyne, if not also blindingly white and anglophone. If I was feeling particularly shitty I might call this playlist “The Cool Landlord Special,” or “The Millennial Gastropub Owner’s Desired Vibe.” By itself, I’m not gonna shit on anyone for liking Roxy Music, Portishead and Siouxsie and the Banshees. But if we’re talking about the context the game is in, e.g., a teen movie set in 1999, the majority of this shit feels wildly out of wack, with very few exceptions. Add to this context the fact that within the game, in actual spoken dialogue, Stacey tells us that she tapes MTV every single day while she’s at school to stay up on current trends.

This key paragraph lodges two complaints. I’ll get to the idea that the game is not historically accurate.

First, I’ll focus on that the game is blindingly white and anglophone.

“Sounds about white” is a pithy Twitter thought. And yeah, I guess Mixtape has a lot of white people music.

“Sounds about white” is only a pithy Twitter thought though.

Modern gaming criticism is full of these throwaway progressive complaints. Checks notes waves arm, everything is an awful hellscape, we’re destroying the rainforests to nudify women without their permission, ACAB, capitalism is bad, orange man bad, etc etc.

These aren’t frivolous complaints but they’re often untethered from any larger context — pro-forma inclusions to satiate the audience. Which leads to total non-sequiturs like this one from an infamous Kotaku PS5 hardware review:

As I’m writing this, it looks very likely that Joe Biden will be our next president. But it’s clear that the worst people aren’t going away just because a new old white man is sitting behind the Resolute desk—well, at least not this old white man. Our government is fundamentally broken in a way that necessitates radical change rather than incremental electorialism.

The harsh truth is that, for the reasons listed above and more, a lot of people simply won’t be able to buy a PlayStation 5, regardless of supply.

People can’t buy a PS5 because Joe Biden is an old white man. Got it.

This is pointless recitation of progressive catechism; readers know if they can afford a PS5, you don’t have to tell them that they can’t!

Johnny Galvatron is white. He made a game with white people music. I assume he speaks English so yes, his track choices are “anglophone.” And?

Take the time to explain why it’s a problem or don’t bother mentioning it. As it stands this observation merely assures the audience they’re in the safe hands of one of the good whites.

Maybe the problem is that capitalism and Annapurna only fund white people games. It’s not that the game is white, it’s that only white games get made. That’s a good angle minus one minor detail: it’s not true. Annapurna publishes SILENT HILL: Townfall, Thirsty Suitors and Snap & Grab. (Side note: I think it’s silly to call Mixtape a white-person game because it has white-people music, and silly to call Thirsty Suitors a minority-person game because it has minority protagonists)

Maybe the implication here is that only white people — a certain type of guy — could like Mixtape. But look at that list of names above.

Or more broadly, that the game claims to be universal but is white. This complaint is trivial. A game can only be set where it’s set, use the specific songs and characters it uses. It can’t be 1990s California and 1700s Mongolia. Fiction makes specific choices, in that sense no fiction is universal.

I quoted Khalief Adams above. Your prototypical older white guy Type of Guy, I guess. He ended his thoughts with “and why it makes me yearn for more of these stories from other perspectives.”

This is such a better version of the same point! And you get zero credit for sighing about whiteness as a white. If anything it’s suspicious.

I dwelled on this because it’s so common in Mixtape complaints and such an affectation of modern games criticism. “I noticed the game is pretty white.” Congratulations on having eyes and ears.

“Garfield Wouldn’t Have Liked Lasagna”

The back half of that quote is a running theme in all of these Mixtape pieces.

But if we’re talking about the context the game is in, e.g., a teen movie set in 1999, the majority of this shit feels wildly out of wack

The game isn’t historically accurate. A girl like Stacey wouldn’t have made a mixtape like that in 1999.

Garfield, were he a real 1978 cat, wouldn’t have liked lasagna.

It’s absolutely bizarre how heavily these pieces lean on appeals to historical accuracy, as if the authors are unaware that “mUh HiStoRicaL AccUraCy” is a widely mocked concept in progressive gaming criticism.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance strives to be historically accurate. The game is frequently knocked in games media for not being diverse enough, despite being set in 15th century Czech Republic.

It’s conventional wisdom that historical accuracy doesn’t matter much, even in genres like historical fiction and simulation. World War 2 games like Battlefield V overrepresent female combatants. Soccer simulation games allow you to pit men and women against each other on equal footing. Invoking historical accuracy is considered gauche. It’s a right-wing argument — the argument of the enemy.

The Dark Knight Returns

In that context it’s absurd to hinge criticism of Mixtape on historical inaccuracy. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a simulation. Although it’s ostensibly set in the 90s it’s not literal; it includes a song from 2011. It has teenagers bound like The Hulk and explode cars by pointing at them. It’s magical realism.

I prefer historical accuracy, all things being equal. If you’re making a game featuring Aztecs make the housing look like Aztec housing, game design permitting — someone might learn something!

But I’m not wedded to historical accuracy. I don’t care that there are mixed teams in EA soccer or who is cast in The Odyssey.

I don’t care about historical accuracy in Mixtape because I don’t know why I would. It makes no pretense at being era-authentic. But people who deride historical accuracy now find it paramount. It feels insincere.

When Critics Advocate for Worse Art

The most misguided part of this review is the argument that the game should better reflect the Billboard Top 100 or Total Request Live’s Top 10s.

Some of this is an argument about historical accuracy, some the author trying to turn “they didn’t choose the tracks I would have chosen” into six paragraphs, but more than anything it’s an argument against artistic intent and authorship, in favor of algorithms and statistics.

In some places these writeups seem oblivious to the concept of artistic intent or rule it out entirely. Why does this game, set in the 90s, include a song from 2011 and other lapses of authenticity? Probably an error! Just nobody noticed!

In other places they’re actively hostile to the concept.

In their view, art should reflect the statistical average. Forget choosing songs based on how they fit the scene, what they’re trying to say, or what speaks to the author — look up the most popular songs and put those in!

These pieces are full of cynicism over the commodification of nostalgia. But for these critics Mixtape is not cynical, calculated and commodified enough. It’s too personal, too intentional. It leaves money on the table by choosing “weird” songs over chart toppers. It would be better off, both commercially and artistically, were it lowest-common-denominator.

I have this screencap of an interview saved to my desktop.

I saved it because it’s an attitude I can’t stand. This is a narrative designer arguing that the baseball section of Bioshock Infinite isn’t on-the-nose enough and should be more straightforwardly didactic — that it should literally say “racism is bad.” I’m similarly peeved by Andy Weir’s comments that Star Trek should stick to ships shooting each other. These appear to be opposite sentiments: fiction should be overtly didactic vs not at all. To me these are opposite politics but ultimately the same sentiment: art should be less sophisticated.

That’s a bummer coming from authors and it’s a bummer here coming from critics. That Mixtape should have jettisoned personal taste in favor of algorithmic determination is an idea you’d expect from a CEO, not a critic.

A critic demanding that a work be more stats-driven has lost the plot entirely.

Maybe this is who AI art is for.

“Don’t write about your little life” - Toni Morrison

It is worth examining why an Australian rocker whose music career started in 2007 has decided to make games set in Colorado and California in the 90s, with soundtracks almost exclusively based in the 60s, 70s and 80s British and American rock eras. It is worth examining why so many video games are set in the Pacific Northwest, why so many game narratives take on the shape of an edgy 80s or 90s teen comedy or steep themselves in the signifiers of suburbia so heavily.

If it’s worth examining then examine. You’re the critic, you’re writing the review.

This is pure innuendo. Maybe a different, more sophisticated critic will examine these issues and arrive at a devastating conclusion that savages Beethoven and Dinosaur.

We can’t do that because we spent too much time pointlessly laying out four different top singles charts.

This takedown fails in a way I’ve never seen a takedown fail before: via the inability to say a single interesting thing. It’s posturing about shoving people into boxes, plot recap followed by “I don’t like the songs”, gesturing at charts, then more recap, of both the game and of the reviewer’s life.

We don’t have time to examine why Australians would make a game set in California, but we have time to cover where the reviewer went to middle school. Born in Southern California, raised in Oklahoma. None of those details matter at all. They aren’t in service of any point beyond that the nostalgia worked, but only a little.

Tell me that Mixtape takes place in Apple Valley and doesn’t ring true to you as someone from there. Don’t tell me, for no reason, that you’re from Apple Valley and that it’s technically in the middle of the High Desert of San Bernardino County. I like learning new things but surely we have better ways to spend time than on geography lessons.

This is weak criticism. We spent so much time on posturing and recapping and charts that we forgot to do analysis until the final few paragraphs. I’m not sure if this is a compliment or an insult but it’s even worse hating; it’s just “grrr check out what a hater I am” unmoored from any insight with teeth. Good hating is formidable.

After you’re done here do yourself a favor and find a video of William Friedkin or Harlan Ellison. World class haters. Sharp, biting, intimidating. The hating here is just a shirt that reads “I’m with stupid” with an arrow pointing at Mixtape.

Intermission

If you’re glancing nervously at the scroll bar on the right, don’t worry. This post includes two scheduled intermissions.

Take a break, relax.

Apparently a real 1912 intermission graphic

“On Mixtape (2026)”

Past the introduction, On Mixtape begins in earnest with:

We can dress it up however we like, but the truth is that Mixtape is a vibes-driven experience riding high on some kind of media nostalgia.

Once again we’re immediately in trouble.

Mixtape presents a problem for thinky critics: if you like the music and vibes you’ll probably like the game, and if you don’t you won’t. But it’s hard to turn “I don’t like the tracks” into 15 paragraphs. So these pieces turn to weak alternate angles.

The thrust of this piece is that commercialized nostalgia (and more broadly capitalism) is bad. This might have been an interesting observation in 2010, before Ready Player One was published. But this is 2026. There’s a Barbie and a He-Man movie, two new Ghostbusters. The Ninja Turtles and Simpsons are in Fortnite. The new Star Wars movie is about a Yoda and a Boba Fett. There’s a new season of Scrubs, two new Dexters. The Last of Us is remastered every 2 years.

“There sure is a lot of commercialized nostalgia” is only interesting as a screaming cathartic polemic. It doesn’t work as a novel observation. And the “truth” that Mixtape is nostalgic is blindingly obvious to everyone. Nobody is claiming otherwise.

This is the same grand revelation as from the previous piece, phrased similarly:

There’s no way around this: Mixtape uses nostalgia as a bludgeon to beat players to death with.

Nostalgia for Kaile Hultner

This piece makes many of the same points as the one by Kaile Hultner while explicitly referencing that review.

Kaile Hultner, in a “hater’s review” of the game, has already patiently walked through the strangeness of those selections and how far they are from the notional historical context of the game. The lack of anything that looks like the most popular music of the 1990s is weird…

More historical accuracy complaints. More Billboard Top 100.

More “Garfield wouldn’t have liked lasagna.”

It repeats points that were weak the first time around. What of The Mystery of When Mixtape is Set? The song choices are too cynically calculated for maximum nostalgia mining but also too weird and unpopular. That Mixtape appeals to a certain type of guy. (That we dislike)

It’s the same points in inert new anti-nostalgia packaging.

A review should prize information and accuracy over novelty. If a game has bad play control you highlight the bad play control, even if every other review does likewise.

But you write a think piece because you have something to say. Nine paragraphs into this essay all we’ve done is set up an anti-nostalgia anti-capitalist framing and agreed with Kaile Hultner.

Flimsy High Concept

“On Mixtape” is a prototypical example of highbrow games writing. It leads off with a high concept idea and tries to tie Mixtape into larger themes. Unfortunately it doesn’t have much to say about either.

Mixtape is “nostalgic” but not for a real time and place — nostalgia under capitalism. Sure.

But the essay struggles to say more than that, and stretches to hold Mixtape up as a notable example of capitalist exploitation.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is IP exploitation from a massive corporation. Mixtape is from a small developer with no IP to flog. Mixtape invokes nostalgia for feelings of youth; Space Jam invokes nostalgia for specific products. The piece acknowledges this then plows ahead unfazed.

The Clockwork Orange crew appears in Space Jam only because Warner Brothers owns the rights. Smashing Pumpkins appears in Mixtape because people know and like Smashing Pumpkins. It functions as a band, not as intellectual property. Yes it is intellectual property — that Beethoven & Dinosaur doesn’t own! There’s no cross-promotional corporate synergy. Quite the opposite: the developer pays licensing fees.

Johnny Galvatron is not analogous to the CEO of Warner Brothers. Beethoven & Dinosaur is a company of what looks like 15 to 20 people. These aren’t apt comparisons.

The comparison is made, I assume, because Space Jam: A New Legacy is about as cynically exploitative as a movie can get. The comparison adds weight to the accusations against Mixtape; it’s the Space Jam of games!

Except it isn’t. It just isn’t. Fortnite is the Space Jam of games. Mixtape is the Lisa Frankenstein of games.

World Weariness and Prose Creakiness

“On Mixtape” adopts a world-weary tone.

Most games I do not like these days raise nothing in me at all, and they wash over me like static. I uninstall them. I go outside. I tend my garlic. I’m old now.

There are regular invocations of nothing new under the sun, been there done that.

There’s a political world-weariness and liberalism as bearing witness to suffering. The author identifies Spotify as “one of our most evil platforms.” That they use regularly. (“No ethical consumption under capitalism” I guess)

There’s a general tiredness and sense of resignation.

The writing itself reads like the output of a tired, resigned person.

The vibes-driven nature of Mixtape, a game so music-driven that the name tells you what it is, means that there are some formal elements that you have to deal with up top. The list of songs that make up the game are frankly bizarre.

The name tells you “what it is?” (“That” it is?) The name tells you it’s a music game? Most music games do: see Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Dead as Disco, Elite Beat Agents, Rythm Heaven, etc. The game is vibes-driven so we have to discuss the formal elements up front, and the formal elements are…the song list?

The formal elements aren’t handled up top; they aren’t handled at all! The gameplay (I’m not sure what the author considers the formal elements to be) is relegated to a parenthetical aside indicating it may be handled in a separate writeup “at some point.”

It’s really something to not cover what you describe as the most interesting parts of Mixtape because they don’t fit into the toothless anti-nostalgia framing.

The best high-concept writing uses the details of the game to explore the larger themes and vice-versa. (See “We Are All Becoming More Thick” by Jake Steinberg, for example) This is the opposite: the concept precludes discussing the game in detail.

Elsewhere Kunzelman feels confusion and cliché over Mixtape’s visual language, but doesn’t say anything about that language beyond that it evokes Wes Anderson. Why is that confusing?

These writeups tease interesting avenues then barrel past them.

The quote above is immediately followed by:

They are ostensibly collated and organized by the protagonist Stacy Rockford

Ostensibly?

Ostensibly suggests that the mixtape isn’t made by Stacey. Is that the case? Either way it doesn’t factor in.

I think the implication here is that the tape was “ostensibly” made by Stacey but was actually made by the game’s developers. Which: yes, that’s how fiction works.

Or maybe the tape is “ostensibly” made by Stacey but Stacey, were she real, wouldn’t have made this exact tape? So back to “Garfield wouldn’t have liked lasagna.”

Maybe they just used the wrong word.

I’m no grammar expert but sentences like these break my brain a bit:

“music for dads who have a garage to listen to in that garage”

You mean “music for dads to listen to in their garage” or just “garage music for dads”? This is textbook impotent writing, where most words convey no meaning and just perform grammar duty. (And here, add confusion)

I’m not being pedantic; this is genuinely hard to read. (Close to a garden-path sentence)

The end of this is similarly hard to parse:

…a weird reference to a Montel [sic] Jordan song that never appears. I don’t have anything more to say about that other than how truly, unthinkably bizarre it is, and that maybe literally anyone up and down the line should have thought about either the fact of that or at least an explanation as to why.

What’s even happening at the end of this sentence? This is hard to read, and implies that not a single person on the team considered how the game teased a Montell Jordan song. I can assure you they did.

These may seem like nitpicks, but the non-sequiturs, incomplete thoughts and critical mass of “as / to / what / why / that / for” filler requires that readers work not just to understand complex thoughts, but to simply parse and follow the essay.

I’m not trying to score points by pointing out a strange use of “ostensibly.”¹ But this essay has legibility issues and filler words drain vitality. The closing line lands with a wet thud due to phrasing.

A Closer Examination of Dick

If that section seemed pedantic buckle up and bear with me.

Time Out of Joint is described in the essay as the “1950s return with a nostalgic full vengeance.” That’s not a great description of the book.

The Fredric Jameson quote about the “function of nostalgia in the 1980s” is not about the function of nostalgia in the 1980s. Time Out of Joint, written in 1959, imagines the 1950s as recreated by future society. It answers the question “how will the future nostalgize the present?"

And to Jameson it raises related questions: how well can the future know the past, and how well can the present know the present?

Jameson poses that the “deeper realities” of a period may have little to do with stereotypes. He then poses that perhaps the deeper realities of a period may be unknown even to those living in that period.

We then reach Kunzleman’s quoted text, the even more radical possibility: that period concepts finally correspond to no reality whatsoever. That there are no “periods” or even “history” — that reality can never be properly conceptualized when viewed from any vantage point.

It’s not about the function of nostalgia in the 1980s!

Verify for yourself if you’d like. (This is a PDF, click at your own risk!)

I’d hazard to guess that this Jamesonian take on nostalgia is being combined with Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. That may sound unfamiliar but you may have seen the meme:

When you read that Jameson quote with no context, and with the last lines removed, after being told it relates to nostalgia, it looks a lot like this meme. That in the final stage of nostalgia, the nostalgic representation bears no resemblance to the period.

What the quote actually says is that, as a possibility, reality may be unknowable from any perspective.

If we’re going to take this possibility as the truth— by the way this is an aside in the essay, not the thesis — we’re dinging Mixtape for improperly capturing the 90s when the 90s was unknowable even in the 90s.

Kunzelman says “he could easily have said this about Back To The Future.” I don’t think he could have. The name of the essay, “Nostalgia for the Present”, derives from the central conceit of Time Out of Joint.

I’m sure Jameson could say something about Back to the Future. But that movie wouldn’t have prompted his comments.

What I’ve been building to is this:

When Kunzleman writes “late capitalism collapses previous eras into easy narratives and aesthetic packages. That’s what it does on a fundamental level…” it sounds like that’s Jameson’s point. That if you were to read that Jameson essay you’d see that it’s about how late capitalism commercializes nostalgia and substitutes it for real history. That a movie like Back To The Future — a look back on an idealized 50s from the 80s — is an example of that.

That’s not what the essay is about, at all. It raises the possibility that there isn’t a real history or even a “totalizable” real present. The 1980s look back at the 1950s is in the context of how Blue Velvet and Something Wild confront the past. (That’s the “Jamesonian allegorical encounter”)

Jameson’s essay never even mentions capitalism.²

I believe “On Mixtape” is simply way off in how it uses Jameson. In essence it points to Jameson to say “this smart guy agrees with me”, when that guy was talking about something basically unrelated.

In Conclusion: Don’t Love It

The second is a return to nostalgia, the pain of our desire for the past not being given to us, and how analgesic the game ends up being. It is numbing, I think, and in that way it does provide that final Stand By Me line. He³ asks if anyone ever has friends like they do when they were twelve. If we cannot wholeheartedly answer yes, that we do have deep friendships with others as adults, then something has been done to us. Nostalgia was a name for something being done to us, and perhaps Grafton Tanner’s retrobait might be the word to explain what in Mixtape is being done to us.

I’m struggling to understand what we mean by “it [Mixtape? nostalgia?] does provide [?] that final Stand By Me line.”

The implication here is that, if you can’t form deep adult relationships, it’s because something was done to you, and that thing was nostalgia?

Is the male loneliness crisis due to Space Jam: A New Legacy?

And Mixtape will similarly sabotage our ability to form adult relationships? Or do something equally nefarious?

(Friendships between kids is a running theme in Stephen King’s work, it seems deeply personal to him. I don’t know why we’re boiling that Stand by Me line down to nostalgia)

I don’t think Mixtape is doing much of anything to you! It’s a three hour video game you chose to play, then chose to keep playing when you didn’t like it. It hasn’t sabotaged your adult relationships in the week it’s existed, nor has “retrobait” committed that sabotage. Nor has nostalgia.

This is catastrophization and non-sequitur.

Mixtape threatens us with grave harm. It’s doing something to us. We’re helpless victims as Mixtape leaps off the digital shelf and injects us with retrobait, like a Facehugger.

In reality we played a video game and didn’t care for it. Hardly injurious.

The piece ends with this:

Mixtape‘s collapse of history into comforting vibes should make us question why that comfort works so easily, and more importantly, why the assumption exists that it would.

This line belongs to a wildly different piece: one about how Mixtape worked despite being plainly cynically nostalgic. But what we read is that it didn’t work. You found it eyerollingly cliche. You don’t have any love in your heart for it. It didn’t work as well as Detention. (Side note: terrible movie!)

And, at the risk of being boring, Annapurna assumed (in a calculated gamble way) that Mixtape would work for dull business reasons like the sales numbers of previous games. I know I’m supposed to read this and think “we’re hopelessly caught in the net of capitalist nostalgia” but the answer is mundane.

I don’t think this essay is problematic, let alone harmful. But — as if this weren’t already obvious — it really bugs me.

This is so much rickety Jordan Peterson writing. I’m supposed to let the words wash over me and vibe, without stopping to examine their meaning.

That works for music. I don’t pay much attention to lyrics; I often have no idea what the songs I like are actually about.

That doesn’t work for an essay.

The more I read the essay, the more I find that the “concepts finally correspond to no realities whatsoever.”

I don’t think Time Out of Joint is about what Kunzelman think’s it’s about, I don’t think he has a good grasp on that Jameson essay or that particular passage.

I don’t think his characterization of a developer interview is fair. Yes, Galvatron does mention a “mixtape of mechanics”, but not to mean the mechanics are all cynically borrowed from other games, that there’s nothing new under the sun. The mechanics are inventive! He means there’s a variety of mechanics that come and go.

The mechanics aren’t “all stereotypes, all genre standards”, “a greatest hits experience.” A tongue wrestling minigame is a genre standard?

It’s not fair to equate Mixtape with Space Jam or to draw parallels to Spotify. It’s weak to ding the visual language in a throwaway line.

This looks like a great essay, in the same way Landman looks like prestige TV. It references novels and movies. In incorporates a quote from a great thinker and flirts with big ideas. It’s wide ranging and erudite.

But the closer attention you pay the less sense it makes.

The deck is stacked against the reader. The average reader isn’t familiar with Time Out of Joint. They haven’t read that Jameson essay and have no reason to doubt Kunzelman’s claim that the essay is about “the colonization of all aesthetics by capitalism.” When he mentions the “Jamesonian allegorical encounter”, without properly defining it, the reader will take on faith that Mixtape fails to deliver a satisfying one.

I think the assumption here, conscious or otherwise, is that readers will hit parts they don’t understand or aren’t familiar with and assume they’re probably correct and smart. That’s often the rhetorical trick (and evolutionary advantage) of academic-style writing.

That’s not dishonest or harmful. But it feels a bit unfair.

Ultimately the essay is both confusing and confused. When you strip away the loud sighing over capitalism and nostalgia, the ill-fitting supplemental material, and the dodgy comparisons, there’s little left.

Intermission

We’re on the home stretch now!

Why not take a break? You’ve earned it! (Dave Fleischer)

“What Year is Mixtape Even Supposed to Take Place Anyway?”

From Polygon: As a period piece, Mixtape plays it too fast and loose.

This piece is explicitly about The Mystery of When Mixtape is Set but the answer to “when does it take place?” is straightforward:

Who gives a shit.

I have to ask: are all these authors on a modern JournoList where they collectively determine angles? I can’t understand why this angle is interesting to a single critic, let alone four.

Batman: The Animated Series is ostensibly set in the 90s. But it has 1940s cars and fashion and blimps, alongside futuristic helicopters and computers. Which prompts the obvious question:

Were the creators stupid?

This entire line of inquiry feels like a mix of CinemaSins plot-hole discourse and Reddit trying to solve a mystery box TV show.

Solving actual mystery box media could be fun. So could treating “where is The Simpson’s Springfield?” as a serious question. But I don’t know why we’re fixated on being so literal-minded about the totally irrelevant non-mystery of Mixtape.

Once again, this writeup treads well-worn talking points: marketing materials claim the game is universal when it isn’t. That a certain type of guy likes the game — in this case a “very specific audience.” Does Polygon have demographic sales data? I don’t think they know what audience bought the game.

That said the piece is harmless. It’s fine. I just don’t know why it exists and is focused on a complete irrelevancy.

The different experiences of different generations is potentially interesting, but the entire first half up to “Where Beethoven & Dinosaur goes wrong” could be cut with no loss.

This needed an editor to identify and focus on the good parts: the specific observations and personal bits.⁴

My brother, who is six years older than me, had a radically different high school experience than I did. He was watching Dazed and Confused and romanticizing stoner culture; I was navigating high school in George W. Bush’s new, fear mongering world order built from the wreckage of 9/11. The contexts in which we came of age mattered.

The piece I’m covering in the next section includes this:

[Dazed and Confused] is much like Mixtape in that it focuses heavily on the minutiae of teenage party preparations, and has an era-specific musical spine carrying many of its most memorable moments. It's a movie that has since resonated with successive generations of adults because, even if the fashion and tech have changed, the social archetypes it presented and the feelings of being a kid have not.

Author B used Dazed and Confused as an example of universal media, and Author A used it as an example of non-universality!

Interesting things can happen when you make specific points rather than repeat, once again, that Australians made a game set in California and that Garfield wouldn’t have liked lasagna.

“I Don’t Know Who Mixtape Is For”

Mixtape is an exploration of adolescent love and friendship, how that survives the transition into adulthood and what it means to come of age in a place you don't want to stay in. Because of this, and because it's set in the 1990s, you can't play or even read about Mixtape without encountering the word "nostalgia".

The claim in the essay is that you can’t read about Mixtape without encountering the word “nostalgia”, with a link to illustrate that point.

But that link is to a google search for “Mixtape nostalgia.”

So yes, if you specifically search for “Mixtape” and “nostalgia” you get results, some about Mixtape.

Moving on.

If you’ve read the other pieces you’ve read the first half of this one.

It says it’s the 90s but it’s not really the 90s. It’s both too cynical and not hit-driven enough. It’s aimed at a certain type of guy. It trades in nostalgia, but it’s not specific or authentic enough to work as targeted nostalgia. It’s white. Shades of Ferris Bueller.

Yes yes yes. We’ve been over this two times already and you know it.

Plunkett quotes Cameron Kunzelman, who in turn references Kaile Hultner; a human centipede of critics passing on opinion.

I’m not suggesting an ethical issue like plagiarism but more….why?

These essays have partially derailed by being so discourse-focused and aware of prior criticism. Kaile Hultner was fixated on the track list being ahistorical, so that point has carried through to two other essays.

Maybe each of these authors independently decided that the ahistorical track listing and other era nonspecificity was a real concern, then found other authors who agreed with them. But the end result is that these essays repetitively make the same points that weren’t interesting even the first time.

Here’s an example of what I consider good thinky games criticism, Playthings by Claire Hosking:

So I got a bit nervous when I saw a lot of negative reactions to Cortana’s new larger boobs. Not because that reaction wasn’t coming from a good place - these were people I respected, reacting against objectification of women and the presentation of unrealistic ideals to young women. But just a couple of weeks earlier I heard they’ve got plans to make the new Lara Croft incarnation deeper, and part of that will be making her boobs smaller. The implication that larger boobs are a liability to well-presented, deep characters makes me nervous because, well, how many stacked women get to have complex stories in popular media?

This is classic “new games journalism”: partly about specific games, partly about culture, partly about the author.

It is weird that to make a female character more serious we make her chest smaller, and especially weird, I imagine, for women with that natural shape.

But these aren’t obvious thoughts (at least not to most men, anyway) and they weren’t commonly voiced at the time. This is new and interesting; it “makes you think.”

These Mixtape pieces are the opposite: instantly tired, voicing the same surface-level observations that everyone on social media has made. Whenever they threaten to provoke thought they defer or change the subject.

This is another piece that acknowledges interesting aspects but barely touches on them, having dwelled so long on reiteration and irrelevancies. There's still a lovely little video game here, with the interesting minigames like — well fuck we’re out of time!

So much of the discussion around this game--and I've fallen for it here with the opening half of this post--has focused on Mixtape's nostalgia….

I can’t feel bad dismissing the first half of this post when the author does the same. But here’s the rub: you can edit!

Maybe for rational-economic reasons these sites only work as rapidly produced stream-of-consciousness. But if so: what are we doing here?

Hultner’s piece serves to affirm hater’s opinions and give them a backing voice to point to. Not a noble purpose, but at least a purpose. I don’t know what purpose this essay serves other than that Aftermath has to publish essays to stay in business, and essays on the topic-du-jour make for good engagement.

By the way, Aftermath has a second piece on Mixtape that’s also focused on discourse, that quotes both Hultner and Kunzelman, and that plays the Mixtape criticism greatest hits.

Mixtape, rather than other games with similar themes, received financial and promotional backing

That link references Thirsty Suitors.

Which is also published by Annapurna!

What These Critics Left Out

I haven’t played Mixtape. I don’t think I’d like it. I did watch this video.

My first thought is that yeah, it’s pretty cringe. But my second thought is wow, this is the best a bat hitting a ball has ever looked. I watched a shorter version of this clip at least twenty times.

In my first blog post I pointed to Please, critics, write about the filmmaking. Write about the craft. Do close reading. The ability to close read is what separates a critic from a gamer writing “I didn’t like the graphics 6/10” on Steam.

You can’t write “didn’t like the graphics, 6/10” as highbrow criticism.

But you also can’t get so lost in the discourse and making grand points that you forget to write about the video game.

These folks kinda forgot to write about the video game.

I want to show them this video of the bat hitting the ball and yell “LOOK AT THIS.” Would they even know what they’re looking at?

You gotta say something more about Mixtape than “I don’t like the tracks.” (Or just write “I don’t like the tracks” and stop typing) Anyone can look at a track list. The track list looks white, the track list isn’t top 100, the track list isn’t authentically 90s. Again: anyone can look at the track list!

The developers are Australian but the game is set in California. That’s a factoid. You read a basic plot summary and the developer press kit. It’s nostalgic, it’s coming of age, it stars a character named Stacey. Something something Ferris Bueller. No shit no shit no shit.

None of this is anything. None of this even requires playing the game! This is back-of-the-box criticism.

Armond White’s review of Sinners repeatedly mentions “KKK Vampires” and those aren’t a thing in the movie⁵. One of the most devastating things I can say about a critic: I don’t know if he even watched the movie, and if he did I don’t know why he bothered.

That’s my takeaway from so much of the Mixtape pushback. There’s scant evidence that these critics played the video game. I’m not saying they’re lying about playing it. Just that they may as well not have.

Highbrow Criticism Ain’t What it Used to Be

Austin Walker wrote Battlefield Hardline: Cop Out.

It’s not a Twitter thought stretched over paragraphs. It’s not generic liberalisms. It never pauses to speak an irrelevant truth to assure us we’re in good hands. When it pauses for a truth that truth is pertinent.

It doesn’t substitute snark and “voice” for insight. It’s potent, written like a short story in which every word matters.

It’s about big ideas and disparate topics: the function of police stories, network TV shows, Tom Bissell, LA Noire and Police Quest. It has high concept framing. But it’s also dripping Battlefield Hardline specifics.

Austin Walker definitely played the video game and can talk about it in detailed terms.

Much of modern games criticism seems infused with nostalgia for better times. For 2014 Twitter, when you could go viral with a gaming take that wasn’t “007 more like 000 sales thanks to no double-Ds.” For when “voicey” writing felt fresh and the audience had an insatiable appetite for the Jezebels and Mic dot coms. When, post-Feminist Frequency, there was much mileage to be gained by problematizing content. When there were jobs, that paid. (Nostalgia for that one is understandable)

And, I think, for misremembered pieces like Battlefield Hardline: Cop Out.

That piece was high-brow criticism with something to say about both gaming and culture. And we carry on that literary tradition when we point out, echoing a second critic, echoing a third critic and self-proclaimed hater, that were Garfield a real 1978 cat he wouldn’t have liked lasagna.

Same difference.

1. I did add the [sic] to “Montel” though. While we’re at it, nostalgia was not “invented”, it was discovered, and the term coined

2. It does use “bourgeoisie” a few times

3. Who is “he” - the Stand by Me speaker is never identified. There are so many awkward phrasings in this essay

4. Personal bits are fine when they’re relevant, as they are here, but weren’t in the first essay

5. Maybe technically in that some KKK people become Vampires, but they’re two distinct groups and the Vampires don’t even like the KKK