let’s reconsider how we talk about video games
There’s that moment before a tornado where the humidity gets unbearable, the sky — which is often mostly gargantuan cumulonimbus towering tens of thousands of feet into the sky — turns green and gold. Then the front hits. It gets dark. The rain starts pounding, and hey, that’s the sign to go underground.
Unless you live out here, in which case, it might be fun to watch if you’ve got a view.
I’ve been a games journalist and critic for almost fifteen years. I’m pretty good at it, having written pieces that have been taught in schools and at game companies over the years. I was, in fact, good enough, that I got hired to work on some pretty amazing AAA games, and I took the knowledge I’d learned to go make some games that have always ended up on someone’s game of the year lists. In other words, I’ve been around the block a few times.
Since I follow a lot of other critics and pay attention to the conversations they’re having, I also have a pretty good — but not perfect — read on what others are saying; I love reading good criticism, and I’m always on the lookout for more.
Sometimes, everybody’s gotta have a take.
The storm comes, the tornado roars, and it can be fun to watch, and one thing I enjoy watching is when a lot of critics talk about a single video game. In this case, Death Stranding 2’s got a lot of people talking — as Kojima always does — but as with any deluge of discussion about a subject, Sturgeon’s Law comes into effect.
Theodore Sturgeon once observed that 90% of science fiction is crud, but the corollary is that 90% of everything is crud. This is also true with games criticism.
So, because I’ve got another piece stewing and it’s taking a very, very long time to write, and June was coming to an end and I needed to write something, I started thinking about the problems facing games criticism and what we can actually influence with our work.
the setup
On the very first day of film school, my teacher sat us down and asked us what the difference between reviews and criticism is. We discussed it for a while before reaching the inevitable conclusion: a review exists to help the prospective customer in making their decision to purchase a product. Criticism, in contrast, exists to help people appreciate or understand a work better.
Great games criticism is a joy to read. It educates, it entertains, it helps you think differently about a subject you know a great deal about (or, in some cases, reinforces what you already believe; there’s nothing wrong with that).
To be a truly great critic, one must be aware that they are writing for an audience — that is, criticism is an act of service, unless you’re writing for yourself, in which case it’s either an act of navel-gazing, which no one wants to read, or an act of discovery, which you can, at least, share with other people.
I write for myself because I am curious — why do I feel this way? What is this game making me do? How does that affect other people? What makes this work? What were the artists attempting to achieve and did they do it? — and because there is a tremendous joy in figuring something out and sharing it with other people so that they can understand it too.
My favorite compliment to receive has always been “you put into words something I’ve been trying to figure out!” Yes, I was trying to figure it out too! There is an unbridled joy to making a discovery, sharing it with people, and having them respond with the same enthusiasm you had. It worked! It helped people! Hell yeah!
So that’s how I write. I take my boundless curiosity and I focus it on an area I’m interested in understanding better, and I do a lot of research and then I work through the problem and share what I’ve learned with you.
When I wrote at Kotaku, from 2012 to 2019, I developed ideas for articles by beginning with a question, usually, “why is this thing like this?” or “I’ve noticed a problem; is there a game that addresses it?”
If I’m lucky, readers like you enjoy the work and find it valuable enough to hit up the tip jar. If you’re lucky, you get to know more about the thing you care about. We both win.
But… not everyone sees criticism that way. Some people treat themselves as augurs Who Must Be Listened To. Others use it as a platform for self-aggrandizement, like story of Moses coming down the mountain to lay down The Law. Some have no curiosity whatsoever — they write, at best, book reports, or they write to complain, or they rewrite press reports and call it a day.
As someone who takes professional pride in conveying the joy that is learning about video games and seeing where we can take them, this is disappointing.
Some people get defensive about this. They’re doing their best, they’ve got deadlines and word count limits. There’s tons of obstacles in the way, and maybe you aren’t aware of what those are, so we should talk about the barriers that keep good critics from doing their best work, and will, later in this essay.
I write criticism about games because I’m always interested in learning how to make games better. So, this criticism about criticism is meant in the same way — it’s not ‘you have failed,’ it’s ‘what are the opportunities we have to write more engaging, meaningful criticism?’
We aren’t helpless. There are things we can do.
Criticism is itself an art form; for the art form to mature, we must be capable of taking it apart and putting it back together again. If you love criticism, you will find its weaknesses so you can shore them up. If you view criticism as some kind of status symbol — like the monstrously abusive Pauline Kael did — you’re likely to use the work as the self-appointed augurs do, centering the work on yourself and what you’re about, at which point, the question becomes “who is this article for?”
When reading up on material for this article, I stumbled upon an essay by a critic I’ve never particularly enjoyed reading. I find their work lacking depth or insight, and they’re particularly self-involved. Their essay was a complaint presented as a valid concern: “other people got into an anthology and no one paid attention to me, so why am I even doing this? I’m a great, literary writer and it feels like I’ve wasted my time.”
A lot of their work is like this, and they’re far from alone. I find myself asking, when I read them, “who is this for?” because it’s almost always for themselves, personal therapy on the page, like Clint Eastwood performatively talking to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, but with even less charisma.
They teach it in every basic writing course, and it is a necessary component of writing an essay: who is this for?
This is for you, the person who wants to write better stuff, to understand games better. This is not for the person who wants to just say stuff and be seen as An Authority. This is not for people who are insecure. This is for those of you who take joy in criticism, and want your criticism to be even better, even more interesting, reaching more people, having more of an effect.
We’re doing this because we’re excited by criticism, and we know that while we are strong enough to withstand scrutiny, we can only benefit from it.
Now, let’s discuss the problems facing good critics today — the things that we can’t change — so you can understand better why it’s more difficult for great critics to write great criticism than it needs to be. Trust me: it’s not just an issue of skill.
Before we continue the article: Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
the problems we can’t solve
Capitalism is the biggest barrier to writing great work. That might sound ridiculous, but let me try to make my point.
Capitalism is, in short, the idea that some people own property and make money on it without doing any work. It means the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, because the rich are the spoiled kids of rich parents who left them lots of property, or people who go around colluding with their friends to make sure the rest of us can’t, say, start our own competing businesses.
So, you’ve got a game website and it’s doing well, and then the owner of the site sells it to some business guy who doesn’t understand how the website works. He just wants his property to make him money as passive income — do as little work as possible for as much reward.
So he tries to use something he thinks he can understand — metrics — and he focuses on a few bad ones and demands you stop doing the thing that made you successful and instead do the thing that makes him what he thinks will be the most money as quickly as possible.
He drives his property — the business, the website, you name it — into the ground because he thinks his ownership means he’s a better person than you. He has money, you don’t, therefore, he is, in his mind, your intellectual superior. He believes that his impulsive, short-term thinking is more rational and realistic than your own simply because he has more money than you to start with.
So when it comes to games writing, a site like Polygon does well, and then the guys who own Brazzers buy it, lay off all the people who were doing great reporting and criticism, and just try to turn the site into a minimum viable product.
That means off the bat, we have a problem: websites aren’t paying all that much for people to do the kind of work that requires the stability a salary offers.
It takes time to do reporting. When people are offering $100–200 an article and only giving you one article a month, it’s not even going to pay your rent. You’ve got to do other jobs, which either means writing a lot of pieces, limiting your ability to focus on doing a good job (because you’re spread too thin) and you’re also spending a ton of your extra time on the hidden costs, like “while trying to run a gofundme for your heart surgery, chasing down the reviews editor at a major gaming website who decided arbitrarily to cut your pay for an article, only offering a “i thought we agreed to a different amount” as an explanation for breaking his agreement and never fixing your pay until you talked about the website doing this publicly and another editor stepped in to force him to make the change.”
(yes, that is a thing that happened)
Heck, even just Sending The Invoice is a ton of work. I had to relearn how to do it at Kotaku and USGamer (neither is the aforementioned gaming website) multiple times whenever corporate stooges switched systems, and whenever the sites changed owners. Filling out paperwork just to get paid is time I could have been spending just writing an article, you know?
But then there’s the other stuff. The not-exactly-capitalism stuff. For instance, one of the worst editors I ever had would always remove anything about PC Gaming from an article I wrote. She would also cut the article in half. Just, like, blam, slice the article up until it was arbitrarily shorter.
One of the reasons I loved working at USGamer was that I asked my editor there, Caty McCarthy, to let me keep a piece long. I fought for it, she trusted me (100% one of the best editors I have ever had!), and I wrote an article that did crazy good traffic for USGamer.
It’s not like we have the strict limits of a newspaper in most games writing — it almost entirely happens online — but some people still insist on keeping the articles short. Over my years at Kotaku writing games criticism like this, I found that my articles over 3,000 words did more traffic than my articles less. Luckily, Stephen Totilo was kind enough to let me write the longer ones.
But, to this day, you find people who just demand everything be 1,500 words or less. Even though I’ve been writing independently for years, I can tell you — my 20,000 word articles make more money than my 10,000 word ones, and my really short ones don’t even get noticed.
People value letting a topic breathe. It’s not “the bigger an article, the more successful it is,” because that would be bad data — it’s “the article needs to be engaging, and length is determined by what needs to be in the article for it to be enjoyable reading.” We do not need to do a sixty-four hour youtube video rambling about pointless bullshit that people put on in the background the same way the neighborhood rich kid’s parents had a television in their kitchen that they’d just run as meaningless noise.
Unfortunately, if you’ve got an editor who doesn’t trust you, they might demand your piece be way, way shorter, regardless of what the article itself needs, and that means you can’t discuss a topic in-depth, meaning that you can’t do as good a job as you might want. That’s a huge bummer!
Then there’s all the other stuff, like critics with axes to grind, people who are trying to support their friends (I once had an editor intentionally delay an article over six months to try and neg me constantly — including suggesting that the article would have been more timely had I submitted it “back in December,” which is when I submitted it, haha — in order to help a friend of hers replace me, for instance) at the expense of others, requirements that you live in a city that costs $80,000 a year to live in minimum but a salary that’s only $40,000, and all sorts of other shit.
All of this is to say: the fact that any criticism at all gets written is kind of a miracle. The fact that it’s good is like pulling two jackpot lottery tickets in a row.
And then as if that isn’t enough, you’ve got people who are out there lying about you writing for clicks (nearly every games website pays a flat fee for this stuff, or a salary, but EVERY YouTuber gets paid entirely on clicks) while also trying to send a shitload of hate your way. Former Kotaku writer Alyssa Mercante was the target of a bunch of ire from a few influencers…
…and then one of them let slip that the only reason he focuses on her is because that’s how he gets views. Influencers are, more than anyone else, driven by clicks. Journalists? Not so much.
Heck, last night, someone accused me of ‘posting for drama’ because I had the gall to write a thread in which I mentioned a historical fact about a major corporation building hardware as a way to showcase its software so it could get its software on as many platforms as possible. It’s something they’ve done their entire existence! I wanted to talk about it! But this person was mad because it didn’t fit their preconceived notions of how business works.
I’ve had people send me death threats, try to hack my accounts, send me footage of people being butchered alive, accuse me of being a ginger (your guess is as good as mine)
Think about how fucking hard it must be to actually do good criticism in that kind of environment! It’s a fucking nightmare.
This is what we can’t really control.
But…
Well, now it’s time to say some stuff.
the problems we can solve
I have tried to write this part time and time again.
Every time I do, I stop, because it’s hard to talk about.
But let’s try it like this: a few years back, an editor at IGN was asked what she wanted freelancers to pitch more of, because the freelancers wanted a better shot at getting paid, which is entirely reasonable. The editor said she wanted more reporting to be pitched, to which my personal reaction was to frown a bit at my monitor, go “your rates aren’t good enough for that,” and move on.
Checking in a bit later, I saw that the story had exploded in its little corner of the internet. You see, the freelancers were upset — I mean, heck, read the previous section of this piece and you might get an idea why — and a lot of it was justified, but one particular comment stood out to me.
One of the freelancers told the others not to give up hope saying that “what you do is important. More important, in fact, than the games you cover.”
I’ve seen this mindset a lot over the years; for a while, a wave of game websites sprung up with editors promising they’d be different and better somehow, by “covering the people, not so much what buttons you press.”
In Journalism school — and in the general press, puff pieces aren’t really that interesting. They are, however, very easy to cover, but they don’t really get that much traction, and trying to gussy them up as Being Important Stuff doesn’t do anyone any favors.
And… I see that a lot, a desire for importance in the press — that belief that the writer is more important than the game. It goes back at least as far as the New Games Journalism types seeing Kieron Gillen’s manifesto talking about games-as-experiences-you-have and how you feel about that, turning it into articles that were centered not on the way we interact with art, but using the art as a springboard to talk about themselves.
Yeah, yeah, we all did personal essays in our first year of game school. “What I did this summer” essays is a cornerstone of writing assignments for young schoolchildren across the world. Great job missing Gillen’s point.
I made my attempt at it in my Death Stranding article here — but as you might guess, that article is me trying to write about Death Stranding in the way Death Stranding exists thematically. It is a game about connections, therefore, I attempt to build a connection with you.
Like Sam, I’m fuckin exhausted, and at the time, I was leaving two abuse situations, one of which involved being told “you’ll never be anything without me!” a lot, which really made me feel so isolated and alone (like Sam).
So I connected with the game, and I endeavored to write in a way that might connect you and I and the game, all in service of helping you appreciate the game, and, wouldn’t you know it, in the six years since I wrote that piece, I’ve had dozens of people reach out to me to tell me it helped them to appreciate the game better, or that it helped them deal with personal traumas similar to mine.
Obviously I write from a deeply subjective first person experience — I find people respond to that much better than when I write purely college level academic third person authoritative voice — and since I spent time studying creative nonfiction and enjoy the form, I’ve been able to make it entertaining enough to help me pay the bills for the better part of a decade. It seems to be working, so why stop?
I am a single person, speaking to you, a person who may be reading this long after I’m dead. I want this to be as engaging as a conversation, no matter how distant we are. But, because I’m just a person, rather than emulating some Objective Voice From Beyond The Sky, you’re free to agree or disagree with me as you see fit. I’ll do what I can to entertain and persuade, but you’re your own person — I’m here to make a case and give you a good time in the process.
I am also showing my work — because I am writing in my own personal space, I can spend time doing what I am actually trying to do, which is teach prospective readers how to think about systems. Why are things the way they are? How do we get there?
I also write, intentionally, at a level meant for 13–17 year olds to understand. My assumption is that you may be a neurosurgeon who’s interested in the topic, but you aren’t familiar with the jargon, so I do what I can to lay it out as plainly as I can. The goal is to help you understand a topic and develop a framework for understanding others.
My hope is that, even after I’m dead, people who read what I’ve written will use this work to make better art and criticism, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time did for me as an artist and an enjoyer of his films. I want to leave art better than I found it, be a part of Team Humanity as it strives to make art that is more potent and reaches more people. So I show you every bit of my work that I can, to give you everything you need to do better work yourself.
Plus, I just want you to feel like reading my stuff was time well spent.
But the articles aren’t about me, they’re me, a person, speaking to you and hoping to give you something valuable about the games we find so fascinating.
So I find myself at odds, time and time again, with games critics who view themselves as the star of the show, the most important person on the block. I watch them scoff at having to, say, actually understand the thing they’re covering, at doing more than a basic book report that amounts to “here’s what I liked or didn’t.”
Gillen wasn’t saying “make yourself the star of the show,” he was saying “show the audience how games affect us,” and so many people who tried to do the New Games Journalism thing decided this made them important.
Worse still, they scoffed at the very idea of having to actually understand the thing they were covering, because, hey, why would you need to understand something if you think you’re more important than it?
I was lucky. Matt Zoller Seitz taught me this lesson early on in a piece entitled “Please, Critics, write about the filmmaking.” The whole piece is wonderful, but I think this is the heart of it:
That’s an evasion of the film and TV critic’s duty, and an excuse for not doing something because it’s just a little bit harder than whatever you’re used to.
Form is the means by which content is expressed. Don’t shortchange it for reasons of personal convenience.
Refuse to write about form and you might refuse to engage with the heart of a work. The heart of a film, the heart of a TV episode, might be contained in an image or a cut.
So when I see people who say “I’m important, I matter, the game is whatever, I am more important than what I am talking about, this is really all just a way to perform therapy in front of a live studio audience or be the star of the show,” I don’t… really think I’m reading a person who has anything worth sharing with me. They’re too self-involved. They’re not speaking to you as a person having a conversation, as I try to — I am trying to show you why this interests me and why I think it might interest you — not to hold court and demand attention.
Worse still, to suggest that caring about the thing you’re covering is a failing of some kind doesn’t just facilitate ignorance in the audience (and among other professionals in the industry), but it’s also a way to stunt your own growth as a person.
No one benefits, not even you, when you’re a narcissist.
Without humility to let the work or the idea be the star of the show, you stunt your own growth. You understand nothing, you say nothing that matters. By scoffing at the idea that you need to know something, you abrogate your responsibility as a critic to do anything. It means that you are nothing, because you have nothing other than talking about yourself, which, quite frankly, anyone can do, and you just aren’t that interesting enough of a person to make a career out of talking about yourself.
Matt continues:
We see adjectives such as “visceral” or “gritty” or “shaky” or “elegant” thrown around like handfuls of confetti, with no elaboration as to why a particular scene or shot or moment earned those adjectives. We read film reviews which state that the film was “well-shot” or “beautifully shot” but never go further than that.
For a while, some of the New Games Journalist types had this idea that certain words were a no-go in and of themselves. One editor tried to stop me from using the word experience because it was on a list of words he didn’t think you should use — I had to point out to him that my entire piece was me explaining how an experience is created. I was walking the audience, step by step, through the ways that a game can actually have an impact on their minds, how the chemical interactions between each component of the game (art style, music, level design, narrative, quest design, and so on) all go together to create a cohesive whole.
My editor, thankfully, relented.
Like Matt Zoller Seitz, I find myself worried at the negative response I might get from this. A person who’s into criticism to speak about themselves isn’t going to want to hear “you need to talk about the art,” particularly when they don’t actually know about the art and try to minimize it in order to build themselves up.
But your job is to be helping. Criticism is an act of service. You educate, you entertain, you delight. This is not about you. It cannot be about you. If it is about you, it must be about you in a way that the audience can relate to. When I wrote about how to identify abusers infiltrating safe spaces, I received some pushback. I watched people lie about the piece — including one so-called critic, a person who should have the actual capacity to know better, argued that I was condemning Stardew Valley, a game I didn’t even mention.
Of course, the piece began and ended with “I love wholesome games,” and was about a wholesome game that I loved in particular, but that didn’t matter to someone who saw a work of criticism and decided that because it wasn’t entirely positive (and, I suspect, for a much worse reason that’s going to have career-ending consequences when the stories come out), they would take their sixty-some thousand bsky followers and try to start another hate brigade.
Instead of just, y’know, being a good critic, maybe even taking the piece and writing a response to it, they made up an entire story about how you should hate the article because it’s criticising you for the kind of games you like. “Sometimes, bad people will pretend to be good in order to get close to you” is a subject I think is worth discussing, and I would have welcomed a actual response to what I said.
When you write, you are writing for people. The things you are saying are going to be read by somebody, so they should endeavor to do at least something, otherwise they’re just “content” and a waste of everyone’s time.
You know how an actor will ask “what’s my motivation?” They do it as a way to get themselves into the groove, to figure out how to play along with the script, to breathe life into it. Readers are the same way — when we write, we write to be read, we write to act upon the reader in some meaningful way.
The reason people frequently say that they still think about my work months or years after reading it is because I write to answer a question, to give you, the audience, something that I hope is of some benefit. It is, fundamentally, an act of service. It must be.
There is no excuse to be anything else.
Matt’s right: when you talk about the art, actually talk about the art, because that’s why people came to listen to you in the first place. If you say “I am writing about Death Stranding 2,” then by god, you can be sure that your readers have come to the piece because of Death Stranding 2.
When I complain about the short-shrifting of form by movie and TV critics, I often get defensive responses: “Well, they only gave me 500 words.” Or “The filmmaking was undistinguished, that’s why I didn’t say anything about it.” Or “The editor wanted me to concentrate on the plot and characterizations and performances because, well, you know, we’re mainstream.” Or, “I’d love to write about the images, but I’m not a visual person, so that’s not really my area.”
Bull.
If you only have ten sentences to play with, set aside one sentence to make an observation about some aspect of the filmmaking. Otherwise you’re not contributing to visual literacy. You’re not helping.
Lack of space is no excuse.
Lack of editorial endorsement is no excuse.
I am thinking again about that essayist I mentioned at the beginning of this article, who lamented not being considered for an anthology (despite several people they admired making it in) and framing it as the ignorance on the part of the anthology creator. It felt, to them, like their work didn’t matter.
What does mattering mean? I think the answer is simple: other people think about what you’ve done. That means you’ve got to give them something worth thinking about.
(I’m not naming them because I’m here to talk about the behavior more than the person, so you, the reader, can think about this as it applies to you)
Matt Zoller Seitz argues that it should be about the filmmaking, as Ted Gioa before him argued that music criticism should be about the musicianship.
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
The New Games Journalism’s would-be acolytes so often turned it into navel-gazing lifestyle reporting because to them, being a critic was itself a prestigious act, rather than a thing you do with the intent to communicate something to an audience who wants to know about the subject.
To a person desperate to be the main character, the idea of criticism-as-service is anathema.
guy who doesn’t like stuff
Ed Smith, a long-time critic of video games who co-edits Bullet Points Monthly (which I think is one of the better outlets for critical discussion), published a piece while I was writing this one, and I think he saw the sky turning green and the clouds getting dark too.
I don’t know what sparked it but there have been several articles recently about the state or nature of written criticism.
You can read his piece here, and I think you should, because I agree with a lot and disagree with some stuff, and I think — because we’re both watching the same storm, it’s worth seeing someone else’s take on the matter.
He opens by discussing the importance of not becoming a character — that is, someone who must perform to the audience’s expectations, evaluating games In A Certain Way. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always found the Angry Player, the Sardonic Cynic, and the Rampant Writer gamer types so frustrating; their job is to put on a performance of “person who complains,” and not “person who is honest with you,” even when they insist they’re telling it like it is.
The function these people perform is to play the part of an angry reviewer, rather than to actually review the games. When I was first playing Skyrim in November 2011, a friend messaged me, disgusted that I would even touch it. I asked what he didn’t like about it. He paused, then told me he himself hadn’t played it, but one of a billion interchangeable Angry Video Game Nerds he’d been watching had said Skyrim was a bad game because Morrowind had separate skills for daggers and Skyrim did not have that separate skill, therefore, it was a worse game.
Never mind anything Skyrim was actually doing, a guy whose entire identity was built on Being Angry As A Performance had picked the most popular game of the moment and bullshitted up a reason to be angry for the audience that expected him to be angry.
Remember, the purpose of a criticism is to help the audience understand the work better. You couldn’t — you shouldn’t — trust me if all I’m doing is making anger the focal point of our relationship. The Angry Gamers are here to Be Angry, not to Be Honest or Interesting.
I recently read an article by a credulous journalist who platformed a person we’ll call Mr. Butts, a person I personally know has stolen work, sabotaged careers, underpaid workers, and forced them to crunch. The journalist has built his profile as a “pro-worker” guy, but when he heard “yes, I have a revolutionary new system” he said “this guy is a genius,” rather than asking the question many of his commenters did, which was “wait a second. So… all your employees are contractors? So you’re like… Fiverr for game development? You’re a capitalist. You own the property, other people do the labor for a pittance ($20–30/hr is his current rate) and no royalties… and you get all the money?”
The journalist in question didn’t care about the workers, but about being seen as the pro-worker guy, so he had a guy who presented himself as a once-in-a-lifetime genius, and the journalist jumped at the chance to say “look at me! I promote interesting people! I’m for The Workers!” while ignoring the exploitation going on right in front of him.
Now, when it comes to Ed Smith, I find myself disagreeing with a particular section.
That’s not the same as saying that I love videogames. I don’t love videogames. I don’t love videogames as a rule, because that would be anti criticism and tantamount, especially in the context of modern videogame culture, to consumerism. So what I mean is that I’ve always been occupied by videogames — not the games themselves, per se, but the conversations, both with other people and with myself, that the games provoke.
Smith spells “videogames” as one word, when I think it should be two. Obviously that’s a major disagreement we’re having.
But, jokes aside, I do love video games, and I don’t think loving video games means what Ed says here.
Remember when I said “I want to leave art better than I found it, be a part of Team Humanity as it strives to make art that is more potent and reaches more people”?
I’ve discussed, at great length, what I think art actually is — I think it’s a thing humans can and must both produce and consume, in the same way we must produce and consume food. It is nutrition for our existence. When I was told that playing Adios helped people choose to live, rather than committing suicide, it validated that belief — so many people have told me that my art has helped them process their lives. I think art, then is like a gastrolith, the rocks that certain animals eat to aid in their digestion.
Art, in my mind, is something we produce and consume as a necessary function of being human. Therefore, art — all art — is to be celebrated. Wow! That’s so cool that you did that! That you felt that, heard that, saw that, needed that!
Adios was, for me, about writing about leaving the abusive situation that I mentioned in my original Death Stranding piece. Where that article was an attempt at connecting with the reader the way the game connected with me, it’s still a persuasive essay; when it came to actual art, I wanted to get you into the visceral emotions of it — to feel as I felt, even if the details were not the same. I, obviously, never disposed of bodies for the mob.
The result was that people said it helped them continue to stay alive, to patch up relationships with loved ones, process grief — the truth of my experience allowed other people to process and deal with their own reality emotionally, and what are emotions if not a complicated electrochemical process of the human brain? Art is medicine for the mind, and a celebration of being human.
So yes, I love art, because art is human shouting with its entire-ass chest “I was here! I’m alive!” It’s a way to connect with and empathize with other humans. It is not a neutral concept that exists in a vacuum, it is the connection we leave with those who come after, a utility that enriches the existence of others around us.
Art, like criticism, is therefore, a service.
It is a celebration of being human.
So, Ed, I’m picking up what you’re putting down and I agree with the importance of being honest about it, but I disagree with the idea that loving art makes you susceptible to covering it dishonestly. I love art as a concept — but, I love food too, and I’ve had some absolutely undercooked, dogshit dishes. If a chef left shards of glass in my meal, I would be willing to tell you this.
If a chef pulled this horseshit, I’d call it the worst 27-course meal I’d ever had.
Because, if I love food, then I am obligated to discuss why the fuck someone would do a bad job.
In fact, I think loving games means I’m able to keep myself doing it for the right reasons; it’s fun to come up with a creative insult, and we’ve seen how often a person falls prey to writing negativity because it gets them traffic and attention. Hating games is an easy trap to fall into.
Because I love games, and I want them to do well, when a game does not do well, I am able to explain, in detail, “here is why the game did not live up to what it could be. Here is why it failed to achieve its goals.” In film school, we learned very early on the importance of criticism being about approaching the work humbly, trying to understand it, and talking about whether or not it succeeded.
Over the years, I’ve met people who argue you can’t possibly know what the artist intended.
Bullshit.
If you know how the medium works — as Matt and Ted argued for earlier — then you can get a really good sense of what the artist is trying to do. I’ve mentioned before having a portrait painter as a teacher. His name was John, and John once told me a story of an art teacher of his who was purely a theorist, not a painter himself.
In one specific painting, a reflection in a mirror was physically inaccurate, and John’s teacher taught an entire lecture on how this seeming inaccuracy was actually an argument in favor of some form of Communist thought. John, himself an avowed Communist, told me “it was obvious that was bullshit. I mean, clearly the inaccuracy was designed because it made for a more pleasing composition.”
I nodded. That made sense.
Then, with a shit-eating grin, John said “besides, the artist was a fascist.”
If John’s teacher had bothered to understand the artist, he would have known that. John, a sympathetic audience, knew about the actual discipline of painting, and he knew about the artist and what the artist was all about, so John knew the teacher was really just bullshitting for himself.
The lesson was useless.
Like I said, you’ve got to be humble and seek to understand the art and how it’s made if you want to speak authoritatively on what it’s trying to do.
So, as I’ve met people who say “but but but Death of the Author,” even though they’ve clearly never read Roland Barthes seminal essay. What they are telling you is that art is pointless, that there’s no reason to have made art, because art is, they insist, entirely the domain of the reader to understand.
That’s a great way to think about art if you’re a high school student bullshitting an essay trying to get a good grade. “It’s an ink blot! It’s about whatever I say it’s about! I don’t have to learn anything about the art or the artist, I don’t have to try to understand this human communication! I will project my own weaknesses and insecurities onto it! I will make this art about what I want it to be about, so I don’t have to go to the effort of being humble enough to try and empathize with another person.”
Barthes, of course, said nothing of the sort.
What he actually said was this:
To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.
Barthes is saying there can be no definitive work of criticism, because there are numerous ways to understand the art. For instance, let’s say a white person — the kind of person who says “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” — deciding to try to make themselves feel good about race relations in the United States writes a generic “white person uplifts black person” narrative Oscar Bait style story. They might tell you that this work is an important work on race relations…
But, if it’s the movie The Blind Side, in which a white woman adopts a young black man and he thrives afterwards, you might find critics pointing out that it’s deeply racist, that it portrays adoption offensively, and so on.
These are all valid ways to talk about the work.
Barthes was not saying “authorial intent is irrelevant, throw it out and don’t try to understand the work,” he was saying “there are a myriad of perspectives that go into any work of art, and there will always be something to discuss.” The “death of the author” is not a rejection of the literal person who made the work, but the critics who seek to definitively explain a work by tying it solely to the author’s intent.
So, to me, loving art means loving, like, the whole deal of art, not necessarily being dishonest for the sake of maintaining a facile obsession with it. This isn’t fandom, where even saying “Ellie from The Last of Us is a bad person because she abandoned her wife and adopted son to go on a quest of revenge,” will result in people going “so you hate the game, huh?” No, dude, it’s right there in the text! Ellie’s a bad person! We can say that! That she’s a bad person doesn’t somehow make the game good or bad! It’s just a plot point!
Why do people do this? Well, it’s because they view themselves as liking Good Things, and they like The Last of Us. They view consumption as somehow reflecting on them, much like a bad critic views their criticism as a vehicle for centering themselves. So, they go “I’m a good person who only consumes good art,” and if you say “the protagonist is a bad person,” some stray neuron in their skull fires, echoing around in the vast chasm where their brain should be, and they angrily retort “you hate the game!” because if you’re saying Ellie is bad, somehow, you’re saying the game is bad.
It is bad, but not because Ellie is bad. That’s what the essay about The Last of Us 2 is about.
Loving games as an abstract concept does not require one to love every single individual game. If anything, it requires the opposite. If you love games, then you must speak true at all times. If they’re good, then speak with fire about why they’re good. If they’re bad, then be truthful. Loving games should keep you centered, because if you love them — because they are a thing that can only exist if humans make them, and therefore they are a way to connect with and understand the people around you — you will demand they be at their best.
If you love games, truly love them, rather than love being a consumer of them, a fan of them, then you will want them to be at their best.
That’s why I find Ed’s piece so fascinating.
I don’t think that games, as an aggregated concept, are “important”.’ I also don’t care whether a game is good, or a game developer is successful, or if games gain any kind of wider or more credible cultural acceptance.
When I was streaming Death Stranding 2, shortly before I found out about Ed’s article (I’m not sure if it had been published at the time), I talked with Philip Bastien, my cowriter and assistant director on our current game project.
One of the things we talked about is how people get angry when you criticize a game because they think that this game finally made culture respect gamers, and you pointing out the flaws will undo all that work and people will go back to making fun of them again.
So they treat you like a traitor, a person who’s going to prevent them from being taken seriously for buying an Entertainment Product Focus Tested To Hell And Back. They want the game to be Capital-I Important and they are deathly afraid of anything that could jeopardize that.
I think Ed and I are in full agreement on this one; besides, being able to talk about whether a piece of art succeeds or fails is a sign that the art is being taken seriously! It’s a good thing to be able to honestly evaluate a game without worrying that the boomers and Gen-Xers on some cop show are going to make an embarrassing portrayal of a gamer wanted for murder or some shit.
Gamers: take yourselves less seriously, and you’ll find more people actually take you seriously as a result. If you’re posturing, they’ll know. If you have to lie or cover up embarrassing things, people will know you’re embarrassed. If you, a critic, write like you’re embarrassed and trying to go “no please take us seriously this time,” well, you’ll just look like the magicians from the show Arrested Development who dress in silly clothes and hold a sign that says “We demand to be taken seriously.” That’s a great way not to be respected.
I get that you’re afraid of people talking about liking games the way this ad talks about liking cartoons, but come on. Who gives a shit what some ad exec at NBC thinks?
It’s not my job to help games or game-makers with anything.
It’s your job to help people understand games. That invariably means you are helping games or games-makers with something. You’re helping them be more intentional in their actions.
Now, if you mean it like “to help them succeed financially,” I totally agree with you. You must be unflinchingly honest about what a game is. Knowing the precarity of the economy in which we live, I’ll often avoid specifically naming a game that I think is particularly bad if I think it might cause someone to lose their job, but that’s because “what games do to us” is more important than “here’s what I think about why you shouldn’t by this specific game.”
I might tell you “you know, having a lengthy text dump introduction for your game is a bad way to start a game,” because I’ve just played a game that did that, but I don’t really need to say “and that’s why this specific game sucks, don’t go buying it,” you know?
But if you are being honest about how a game is made, you are helping game makers. If I say “hey, The Last of Us is ultimately an assembly of zombie movie dramatic twists taken from movies that are themselves just borrowing from Day of the Triffids, playing a game of telephone, written by a genocide advocate, posturing at having meaningful things to say about human nature, and it’s fundamentally dishonest to do that, you should be more thoughtful about what your art is doing to the audience,” then my readers, other game developers, can bear that in mind when they make games of their own.
Because I intend to be helpful, I have to think about what I am saying — what impact I want it to have on the audience. If I’m just kind of… talking about the game, then who is it for? What is it doing? What’s the point?
So yes, I think it’s not just the job, it’s the best thing you can do with the criticism. It’s the reason the criticism will have any relevance. Otherwise it’s just a book report.
I feel that my only responsibility as a critic is to apprehend every game on its own terms; to understand what the makers of the game are trying to achieve and then clarify and judge to what extent that would-be goal has been met.
I think that’s your primary responsibility, but I think if I say “this zombie story copies from other zombie stories and has a dramatic twist wherein a person who seems friendly is actually a cannibal, but this zombie story presumes to make commentary on human nature, rather than recognizing the original twist was shocking because humans aren’t like that” then I am leading the audience to a larger point about art succeeding or failing based on whether or not it can convey some human truth, and that’s going to move beyond just the game itself.
Ed’s completely right that the important thing is to evaluate the game; the worst thing you could do is be one of those people who gets mad online when someone says “The Last of Us isn’t very good art” because all the critical acclaim convinced you that it totally would make mom and dad respect you and cause the game to be taught in college curriculum and the tv adaptation to win awards and people will finally respect you and not keep making jokes about the stereotypical cheeto-dust-encrusted nerd who lives and dies on Mountain Dew.
I really do think we’re very closely aligned in our thoughts. I love games, but I love the abstract idea of games as it represents Humans Expressing Themselves. I am excited by the chance to play a game I love. When a game is bad, I have a duty to tell you so, which means I’ve contributed to a corpus of game knowledge that will help other people not make the same mistakes.
This is how we develop the discipline of the artform. This is how it grows. We seek to understand it, and as a result, we get to get better, more effective, at being human. We’re helping the people who come after us be even better than we are.
the way they talk about kojima
I did not grow up a gamer. I had to play them in secret or at friends’ houses. That meant I mostly played on the PC, since a dedicated gaming device would be impossible, which meant that until Peace Walker in 2010, I had never actually played a Kojima game (the PC port for Metal Gear Solid barely worked).
But, because of the console-dominated landscape at the time (Microsoft literally closed its PC-centric studios like Ensemble and Aces Team with the expectation that the PC market was dying, gaming editors would tell me nobody wanted to read about a PC Exclusive like STALKER and that I should write about console games instead, and so on), you couldn’t avoid listening to people talk about Hideo Kojima.
A lot of people like that he does gimmicks; to them, this makes him stand out. This is a guy who wanted a console cartridge to heat up so it might give an odor like blood while playing.
As a person who loves pushing the bounds of the medium, I get it. There’s this whole thing going on right now where we’ve figured out The Big Innovations, like “making a game in 3D” or “driving a car,” because the technological gold rush has ended. Now it’s about making the most interesting games, and a lot of people are still stuck in the mindset of “there must be a new innovation,” so they make gimmicks.
Like, hey, we’ve settled on a fairly standard sixteen button control solution with wasd and a mouse or dual analogue sticks. It works for a lot of genres. Just making A New Console That Does Wacky Shit or trying to completely rethink controls to is like slamming your head into a brick wall so hard you make a door. Maybe just use the door someone actually built, bud.
Kojima is interesting because he’s constantly looking at the toys at his disposal and trying to do something interesting with them, but the discourse around him was insufferable because, like Ed Smith discussed, there’s a person out there who wants Games To Be Taken Seriously and Hideo Kojima doing Interesting Things gives them a whiff of “finally, we’ll be taken seriously!”
On the flip side… well, there’s a writer. I’m not a particular fan of their work — they tried to imitate what I was doing at the time explaining game mechanics, to the point where another fellow critic offhandedly mentioned to me “I didn’t like your latest article,” and I said “what are you talking about?” and they went “you know, the one about such and such a platformer. Normally you talk about the mechanics, but all you really said was that this one had a bad jump at one point.”
I responded “but I didn’t write that,” they went “huh, it looked like one of yours. The headline was like one of yours.” But when we looked, it was this other person. Then we got to talking about how they write, and we noticed that all of their articles eventually said something like “you might like it, you might not. You decide.” Very “In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts. Thank you” from The Simpsons.
This critic wrote one of the least interesting reviews of Death Stranding I’ve ever read. It amounted to, basically, “it’s very confusing and I have no idea what’s going on.”
Last week, I saw someone who was a fan of this critic demanding that they be brought back (they are no longer a critic) to write about Death Stranding 2, and my only response was… “why?” I didn’t get anything out of the piece. It was no different than a youtube comment, edited by a professional editor. Who gives a shit?
I also saw an article from someone saying that he skipped all the cutscenes in the game, which blows my mind. There’s some really cool shit in there! It’s an integral part of the experience! It’s why you’re doing the things you’re doing! If you are a professional food critic, why are you abrogating your responsibility by shoving the peas to the other side of the plate and refusing to eat anything but mashed potatoes?
Also, watching one of the tar monsters imitate Sam’s physical responses before giving him a thumb’s down and attacking him is just a deeply funny gag in a really weird and cool scene! If you don’t like it, fine, but how can I trust you to say anything of value when you tell me you’re too lazy and uninterested in what you’re covering to pay attention to it.
If you aren’t paying attention to the game you’re telling me about, then what good are you? What could you possibly provide me, as a reader?
Years ago, several writers, including a writer whose work I do enjoy reading, took issue with “Death Stranding’s Director’s Cut” and several of them started complaining about auteur theory. The general argument was that Hideo Kojima is a bad person for slapping his name on the game he created and directed.
Except… Kojima had literally tweeted saying that he didn’t pick the name Director’s Cut, Sony had, and he did not feel it was adequate. None of these writers seemed to have done any due diligence. Someone said “it says director’s cut and that’s bad because auteur theory” and a few other critics (including some who I respect! present tense! we all make mistakes, and this is anonymous because the behavior’s what’s important, not calling anyone out) started agreeing. They saw the name, assumed it was him, and used that as a launch pad to complain about auteur theory.
Funny thing is, they never once actually discussed auteur theory. Instead, they just kept talking about people taking credit from others, which isn’t auteur theory at all.
Rather than engaging with… literally anything, rather than being curious, a bunch of people decided to take it upon themselves to tear a guy down for the simple act of a major corporation deciding to call an updated release of his game a “director’s cut” when he didn’t even want it called that. You’re calling a guy egotistical for something he didn’t do! Presuming to know something without being humble enough to learn about it makes you the egotistical one!
It was instead “I heard this game centers the person whose job it was to oversee the entire project and I think it’s bad to elevate them above the rest of the team.” That’s not meaningful or interesting criticism, it’s no more meaningful or substantial than a youtube comment.
So, a long while later (I wanted distance because, again, some of these people are legit good humans! They saw their friends saying stuff and got involved! I’m not here to write a callout post but to describe behavior so if you catch yourself doing that, you can go “oh! Hah! dodged a bullet there” and be a better critic) I wrote about auteur theory, and how “why are french movies about cucks?” and one abusive critic by the name of Pauline Kael committed fraud and forgery to try to ruin the reputation of people she viewed as competition, attempting to poison auteur theory — which is simply an attempt to explain “why can I recognize a director’s distinct stylistic influence on a project?” by a wonderful critic by the name of Andrew Sarris.
Our job is to explain, not complain, and I think it’s one of my most entertaining pieces to boot.
Similar critics popped up to criticize Kojima when he tweeted what a Hideo Kojima game is.
The original text was:
A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME means the declaration of me doing concept, produce, original story, script, setting, game design, casting, dealing, directing, difficulty adjustments, promoting, visual design, editing, supervising the merch. I don’t name this for titles that I don’t make original idea, game design or produce.
I thought it was pretty obvious. He’s involved in all these aspects. If he is not, then he won’t call it a Hideo Kojima game.
Now, sure, I used to teach ESL students and I can parse imperfect English better than most, but still, a lot of people seemed desperate for a bad faith read. They treated this like Kojima, a man who literally put the individual staffers who worked on various missions in Metal Gear Solid in the credits of those very missions, something no one else does, was taking credit for everything, as if he’d done it himself.
Thing is, as Brian Ashcraft pointed out, a better translation makes it clear he wasn’t taking sole credit.
The Japanese original tweet explains that “A Hideo Kojima Game” is a statement that he is “involved” (関わる or kakawaru) with all these different facets, not that he is doing them all himself. He is not discounting the work of others.
Instead, he’s explaining that the label “A Hideo Kojima Game” is essentially a seal of approval to show he’s taking part on multiple levels. He does not do this for games he merely conceives, designs and produces.
(I disagree with Ashcraft on the suggestion later in the article that Kojima actually said he took credit “me doing” is ambiguous, in the same way a father proudly shouting “that’s my daughter!” at a little league game does not inherently exclude the mother’s existence)
This isn’t a man who takes credit for, say, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow or Boktai (though apparently Boktai was his original concept, he does not refer to it as a Hideo Kojima game, nor does he brand it that way. Ikuya Nakamura was the director).
Kojima always draws this kind of ire. He stands out. He talks about what he does. And for some reason, just discussing, as an artist, the decisions he makes as an artist… drives certain critics up the wall. So they go “how dare he be in the credits, how dare he talk about what he’s doing, how dare he talk about why he’s doing things,” like they are obligated by some higher power to take this one particular guy down a peg for daring to discuss things he literally did and why he did them… and that’s them failing as critics.
I know what it’s like. I’ve talked about my work before — the aforementioned Mr. Butts? He once tried to force me to run all of my tweets through him so he could police our branding and make sure I didn’t say anything he thought might make us look bad, going so far as to try to get another person to bring it up as if it was their idea to make it easier for him to take over my personal, private twitter account.
I’ve had people get angry with me for talking about the work I’ve done because they’re worried it makes them look less good by comparison. I’ve openly discussed my artistic decision making to show people why I personally am making the decisions I am, and I’ve been met with people who are angry because they think it makes them look dumb by comparison, as if “here is what I am doing” somehow implicitly includes “and because you are not doing it, you are less than me.”
I’m out here going “look at this cool thing! Here’s why I did it! Maybe that will help you when you want to do things!” and people are like “how dare you!”
It’s… because they don’t want people to stand out.
Think about it: if you’re one of those critics who’s writing pieces that are about you and how important you are — like the one critic said years ago “you’re more important than the games you write about,” then, like Pauline Kael, who tried to sabotage the career of Sidney Lumet because she believed she was more important than him:
The real rift between Lumet and Kael came on “a very difficult evening” when the two of them got involved in one of those boring conversations about the function of a critic. “There were two other people present,” Lumet recalls, “and she said to them, “My job is to show him’ — pointing to me — “which direction to go in.” I looked at her and said “you’ve got to be kidding.” She said, “No, I’m not.” I said “In other words, you want the creative experience without the creative risk.” And that was it. She’s never written a good word about me since.
She wanted the creative experience without the creative risk. She hated artists who stood out, because she wanted to be the most important person in the room. Andrew Sarris liked Orson Welles? Kael would write one of the most sensational pieces of bullshit about Citizen Kane, literally forging documents and lying, stealing the research of other people, just to trying to tear him down.
To critics like this, the artist must not stand out, because if they do, then it becomes much more difficult to perform the act of Being The Main Character. If the artist has a personality, you must reckon with it; to an insecure loser desperate to be the most important person in the room, the Artist must be taught a thing or two.
Hideo Kojima is routinely on the receiving end of amateur critics desperate to show themselves off by taking down a big artist. He’s too self-important, they tell you, because of a half-remembered bad faith reading of a poorly translated tweet.
They see him name characters with puns like Oedipa Maas or Wicks Cherrycoke and they get really really mad abou — wait, sorry, those aren’t Hideo Kojima characters.
They’re actually characters from one of the most acclaimed novelists in human history, a guy by the name of Thomas Pynchon, an incredibly funny and reclusive writer who fucking loves puns and weird names to give his characters.
The critic who is desperate to matter is embarrassed by a character like Fat Man (named after the bomb, as I recall) or John “Die Hardman” McClane. Kojima’s out here writing some of the most sophisticated postmodern storytelling in the world, stuff that’d belong in a Pynchon novel, and people desperate to be self-important and famous are out there going “he’s so cringe. He’s so embarrassing, he’s setting the medium back a million years.”
Like this guy, who claims to be a novelist.
Of course, people dug up his writing and found out he himself is a terrible author. He’s trying to call Kojima cringe when he literally writes “The Orc Wars were finally over.”
You know what would be really funny?
Like, really funny?
If we found out what an artist like Thomas Pynchon, who, again, is respected around the world and considered one of the greatest of all time told us how he feels about Hideo Kojima.
In fact, throughout Bleeding Edge, Pynchon references Kojima favorably! He explicitly refers to Kojima as god, which is a literal pun in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and a scene in Metal Gear Solid 4 (Hideo Kojima is also credited as the “voice of god” in the game’s credits).
Pynchon, notable for his refusal to talk to people who take him too seriously, whose books are rich with humor and puns, knowingly references the “Kojima is god” ideal and really seems to like the guy.
Someone who actually knows how to make great art loves Kojima, and someone who writes about “The Orc Wars” declares Kojima cringe.
Maybe that’s something we should sit with. Why is it that when someone is an expert in the field, they love the guy, but someone who is ignorant seems to hate him?
Well, I have a theory. If you think you are the main character of criticism, you’re just a narcissist, plain and simple.
So I watch, time and time again, as people desperate to matter, using the equivalent of high school personal essays, demand to be taken seriously and rage against artists who aren’t anonymous enough to be transformed into an ink blot. They want art to be mindless, empty pablum that can be whatever they need it to be to build themselves up.
They don’t care about the filmmaking, the game design, the musicianship, or anything else, because understanding that means having a level of humility. It gets in the way. It isn’t convenient. If you know nothing about the art, then the art can be whatever you want, like a springboard to talk about how you’re the main character of reality.
If you know about the art, then you have to know what the artist is doing, and if you know what the artist is doing, then you have to think about why, and you have to admit there are things you don’t know.
Understanding art means becoming curious, because now you’re asking “why did they do that?” and the criticism can no longer be a vector to speak about yourself, but to get to know another person.
They must be ignorant — they choose to be ignorant — because these stupid motherfuckers have nothing to fucking say. All they want is for you to see them as the most important person in the room, just like Pauline Kael did, and they will lie and mislead and fabricate and even abuse to get what they want.
To write criticism requires humility.
Speaking about the work and what it means to you is all well and good, but you must do so in the service of your audience. You must be eager to help them out — not use the page as an avenue for self-aggrandizement. The artist, and the art, are not kindling for the fire of your own ego.
They are the fire.
Your job is just to help bring people to it.
So, if you’re a critic, I want you to ask yourself, as you write, “who is this for?” If it’s for you, a way to puff yourself up, a way to tear other people down, as Pauline Kael did, then I’d like you to ask why anyone would want to read that. What is it about you that makes you so fascinating, so important, that people would care about what you have to say?
I think people like Pauline Kael make art worse — they demand worse games, worse stories, worse everything — even if they think they’re making it better (because the ideas are theirs, after all, and they view themselves as The Adults In The Room). They don’t want the artist to stand out; they wilfully misread Barthes to say “he’s saying art has no meaning” as some kind of solipsistic nihilism.
They want to smooth the surface off the art, to buff it down into a mirror-shine, so they can see themselves, and nothing else, reflected in it.
I think if you care about humanity at all — and the thing we create that is art, and the way that art feeds back into our lives to make us better — you cannot situate yourself as the protagonist of your criticism. Otherwise, when an artist is distinct and passionate and deeply, fully human, you’re going to demand they make something more generic, more bland, more compatible with your ego.
To understand another person requires you to give up some part of that. It requires a selflessness. You make art worse when you demand it exist to make your job easier, like the streamers who demanded Bungie change Destiny for the worse, to make it easier for them to do their jobs of streaming, which wasn’t compatible with the needs of the player base.
You don’t have to like all art. You don’t have to be positive all the time or negative all the time. You have to be completely, and totally honest, which is not possible unless you are also capable of being humble enough to love art for what it is: an expression of the humanity of others around you.
If you want to be the main character, then your ability to be receptive to the art other people make is impaired, because you have to argue that they are less than you.
If these people who you believe to be lesser than you make art, then you won’t be curious enough to care about what they’re making enough to be capable of understanding it.
If you can’t understand it, then you will have nothing meaningful to say.
If you have nothing meaningful to say, then why would anyone read you?
After all, there’s plenty of interesting art for them to read instead.
If you refuse to understand art, then why would you presume to be capable of doing anything more than writing a basic grade school level “what I did this summer” essay?
Who is your essay for?
Because if it’s just for your own ego, even you aren’t gonna get much out of it.
Criticism is an act of service. It requires humility. It requires care for other people. It requires love.
Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. I would also like to cheer myself up by buying a model rocket if possible.
If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
