What on earth am I doing here?

A valid question! Let me argue for my existence, in a roundabout way.

Last year, a writer for Esquire named Chuck Klosterman wrote an article called “The Lester Bangs of Video Games”, which asked why there is still no real videogame criticism out there in the world. Klosterman’s main point is that we lack the language for talking about videogames, and that this arises from the overly unpredictable and dynamic nature of the videogame narrative.

 This conclusion irritated me to no end, because not one paragraph earlier, Everything Bad Is Good for You author Steven Johnson attempted to explain (in vain, it seems) that narrative is not at all what hypothetical videogame critics should be writing about.

Johnson claims that videogames are closer to architecture than to more narrative media such as novels or movies. Klosterman’s response is as follows:“But there’s one (rather obvious) difference between architecture and video games: Architecture is static. I live in a building that has fourteen floors, and that’s always true. I can’t manipulate the floor plan of my apartment or the number of bricks in the wall. What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation–he can’t dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future.”Well, fair enough, but it’s just as (rather obvious) that the code of any given videogame is as static as the structure of Klosterman’s apartment building. You can’t manipulate the plan of the levels or the number of polygons in the wall. Unless, of course, the designers decide that you can, and go to great lengths to design the code so it can accommodate this kind of behavior. The addition of agency on the part of the audience in no way removes the autonomy of the designer; it just makes her job very different.This is why architecture is such a good perspective from which to begin developing a language of videogame criticism: in both cases, the audience’s agency contributes significantly to the experience of the work. A viewer’s path through the halls of a given building is as unique and unpredictable as a player’s path through the rules of a given game.Klosterman’s argument is based on the assumption that the structure of a work must be the structure of its story or an abstraction of that story. This is the basis for his ideal videogame criticism, which would discuss the potential meanings of a game. While this might prove an interesting perspective, I think its focus on narrative and interpretation makes it an inherently shallow one. Were I to suddenly declare myself a videogame critic, I would prefer to discuss the experience of exploring the architecture of rules that make up a given game.

As for why I have, in fact, suddenly declared myself a videogame critic… At the end of the article, Klosterman and the quite wonderful Henry Jenkins lament the fact that videogame criticism can’t grow into anything interesting because there’s no one to get it off the ground in the first place. Mainstream sources aren’t interested in writing about games except as an occasional novelty, and the culture as a whole isn’t interested in the discussions that do go on in academia. So where is there a model for how to start a culture of intelligent criticism from the ground up?

A-ha! Right here, and here, and here, and so on and so forth! As an alternative to the dull consumer-reports style of movie reviews that dominates newspaper film criticism, gangs of film critics both professional and amateur have self-organized, via the blogotubes, into exactly the kind of emergent critical culture that I’d like to see for videogames. They comment on one another, hold “blog-a-thons” where everyone tackles a given topic for a day, write about old or obscure movies if they want, and provide a wide variety of perspectives on new releases. It’s friggin’ ideal!

So maybe there isn’t room in the mainstream media for a Lester Bangs of videogames. Maybe that isn’t what we need, anyway. Maybe we’re past the era where a Pauline Kael or Lester Bangs can sweep in and create a culture of criticism out of a cult of personality.* Me, I’d be happy to be the Ted Pigeon of videogames. So, here’s the proposal: I’m gonna start writing criticism about videogames, and anyone else who wants to do the same, you send me a link and I’ll add you to the list over there (provided you can spell and put sentences together in a basic way). And maybe if enough of us get together we can FRIGGIN’ CHANGE THE WORLD! You with me? OK, let’s do this thing!

* I don’t actually know if Lester Bangs has a cult of personality. I don’t know much about him except that I think Philip Seymour Hoffman was supposed to be him in Almost Famous? And Philip Seymour Hoffman has a cult of personality as far as I’m concerned! Anyway, Pauline Kael definitely does.