A couple of conversations from the past couple of days have had me thinking about generational shifts in games criticism communities and how we are still terrible at both sustaining and preserving any sort of history of the discourse.

Here I just want to try to get some thoughts out that can only appear like reductive rubbish if I try to fit them into tweets. I don’t mean to judge any individuals or make any grand claims or even make these observations with any sort of confidence. I’m just musing. Hopefully this post comes across more as self-reflective than patronising ‘back-in-my-day’ rubbish. If it sounds like the latter, I apologise profusely.

So there was a Gamasutra community post (which really just means someone wrote a random blog and chose Gamasutra over tumblr to host it. I don’t know why we give extra authority to ‘community posts’ just because they appear on ‘real’ websites) that was a manifesto for games criticism that, clearly, had not engaged with about a decade’s worth of games criticism that was already making inroads into the areas the manifesto tried to lay a roadmap for. People got really frustrated by it and rightly so.

Games criticism (by which I mean something quite different from games journalism) has always struggled at the margins of games discourses: not really supported by mainstream games journalism websites but neither entirely celebrated by non-gaming press (though that has changed a bit). The writers more likely to be writing this kind of stuff about games are probably those less catered to by mainstream games journalism so this is the area you get more non-white critics, non-male critics, non-cis critics, etc. And, by and large, they are writing way more interesting and exciting things that any mainstream games outlet or white dude critic (self included). But they fail to get rightfully appreciated in either exposure or money because of the whole systemic ways they and their writing are marginalised. So when some white dude blogger comes and writes a manifesto pointing out a direction for games criticism and doesn’t reference any of that super important stuff, their frustration is pretty justified!

But then, at the same time, I feel pretty reluctant to jump on some blogger/game designer for not knowing that stuff exists, even while I am frustrated that he doesn’t. I think it is very easy to not know that stuff exists and I think it is a whole lot harder to find it. As people have told him all the stuff he has been oblivious to, I imagine he feels pretty silly. I’m also just reluctant to jump on anyone for writing out their thoughts without having to read this or that particular cannon, but that is probably just my own self-conscious feeling that I’ve never read enough to have a valid opinion. But, again, the way such a post risks erasing a decade of significant criticism produced predominately by marginalised folk is still something worth being frustrated about and I’d never criticise someone else for being frustrated at it.

Back in 2012, Helen Lewis at the New Statesman posted an op-ed about why we are so bad at writing about games, and all the bloggers got real mad on twitter. I emailed Lewis and offered to write a response piece pointing out that no, we’re not bad at writing about games, we just really suck at supporting the good writing and thus it can be hard to find. The latter half of my response is just listing good stuff for people to find. Liz Ryerson wrote a similar response with an entirely different body of work referenced than my own, which is great.

Six months latter, Warren Spector mused where is the Roger Ebert of game criticism, and all the bloggers got real mad on twitter. The best response to that I recall was Mary Hamilton’s, asking where is the Roger Ebert’s commissioning editor of game criticism.

So this conversation has happened before and it will happen again. It will keep happening because those that produce the best games criticism are not supported by the forms of outlets that could expose that writing to a broader audience (I think this is changing but that’s debatable).

But there’s a flipside concern to this as well that I find interesting/worrying/something. I’m struck wondering how many of the “””younger””” critics (a hugely problematic term but I’ll get to that) that I saw complaining about the most recent manifesto are aware of the past times this has happened. More so, I wonder how many of them could make recommendations to counter that manifesto that were written in the past decade but not the past three years.

That is a hugely patronising-sounding paragraph without some context and caveats! By ‘younger’ critics I am really talking about people who are probably like, at most, five years younger than myself (or, at least, discovered their was a games blogging community at most five years after I did). And in drawing attention to the idea they might not know much ‘older’ writing I don’t mean to suggest they are hypocrites who haven’t done their own research but that as a community/discourse/whatever we are about as terrible at holding onto our past as we are at giving adequate exposure to those that are writing in the present. We have what, at a rough guess, seems like a three-year turnover of game critics where everyone knows everyone writing during that window and all the exciting and new stuff they are saying, but know very little of what came before, much of which might’ve already covered the same ground.

This, in turn, has me reflecting on when I was most involved in a blogging community back circa 2009-2012. You’d have these older game developer dudes who would rock up in conversations and be like “Actually, I wrote something about this in 1999” and it would seem hella rude and arrogant and obnoxious (and, really, it was).

Now I find myself in a position where I want to do the same with younger bloggers. I want to butt in to their conversations and let them know that Leigh Alexander and Kirk Hamilton wrote that letter series about Final Fantasy VII in 2011 or Tim Rogers wrote an amazing review of Mother 2 in 2003 or that David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld came out in 1987. Or, today, after this article was posted on Kotaku, I want to butt in and let them all know that Matthew Burns is a super important game critic who is known, primarily, for his dry and satirical writing style which is more often than not something other than it first appears (here is his great blog, btw).

I feel the urge to do this not because I want to be like “Hey bugger off we were here first” (though that is almost certainly how it would come across, as it did when the dudes butted in to our conversations in 2010) but because I want them to not waste their time repeating the same ground when they could be advancing games criticism into entirely new territory. But then, they are doing this as well so what’s even the problem.

Ultimately, what I think I am feeling about all of this is two things. The first is just the inevitable sliding of me into becoming a dad-aged white dude irrationally worried about his own irrelevance in the face of way cooler kids who could not give a shit what the brainysphere dads of circa 2009 were blogging. The reflectivity this has allowed me to thinking about the anxieties of those who were butting into conversations back then is real interesting.

Secondly, and probably way more interesting and less self-indulgent, is an anxiety over how poor different pockets of games criticism (both writers and readers) are at talking to each other over time. We have this weird repeating generational shift every three years or so where a bunch of writers leave and others come in and while there is a direct heritage there, precious few of the forebears can be named. I wonder how many of the newer bloggers desperate to appear on Critical Distance know who founded that site, or of Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer.

This is getting dangerously close to me saying the various marginal voices writing about games today should pay more respect to their (really, overwhelmingly male) forebears of a few years ago, which is not what I want to say at all so maybe this whole post is an exercise in me coming to terms with having some pretty shitty anxieties. But more so, I think it is interesting to consider why we have this constant flow of old writers leaving and new writers entering so rapidly (again: three years for a generation!) and why there isn’t much continuation of the discussions.

I think the answers to this have all been written somewhere else. The reason it happens every three years or so is, like I said above, the lack of any sort of financial sustainability in games criticism. People just do it around their undergrad degrees or day jobs until they get a day job or have a kid or get over it and then they just disappear. Then new kids come with some spare time and it starts again. Until structures are put in place that actually support financially this sort of writing, that revolving door of writers isn’t going to go away.

The reason that conversation with previous writers doesn’t happen is because the internet is a terrible place to preserve writing. Blogs go offline, links die. But even if they don’t, game criticism blogs sink to the bottom of search results under GameFAQs and metacritic. Critical Distance has done a HUGE job of ensuring their is a depository of past writing, but that only provides one canon (and how few people really go back and try to use it to find writing about older games anyway?). I wonder how many of the blogs in Dan Golding’s “Mapping The Brainysphere” post from January 2009 are still up (this is one time where you should, in fact, read the comments). That these days so many conversations are lost to the giant suckhole that is Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, Tumblr) only exacerbates things

So I don’t know. I don’t have a point to this whole post other than I find it weird and interesting and worrying how contemporary games criticism still doesn’t get adequately supported or recognised; that old games criticism is forgotten by all including many who are worried about newer games criticism not being recognised; that the newer critics don’t know the older critics AND that the older critics don’t know the newer critics (maybe there needs to be more deliberate structures of support?); and the fact that games criticism from three or four years ago even seems old in the first place.





Here Are Some Clarifications Based On Twitter’s Response To These Musings

1. Parts of this ramble put the onus on responsibility on younger/newer writers for this lack of knowledge transfer. That is a pretty typical but inappropriate place to put the blame! A much more valid place to focus critique is the structures that obscure or delete older material, not on new peeps for not reading it.

2. There is no definitive canon of games criticism you must read before you write your own stuff. The last thing I’d want is for people to read this and feel too unread to write their own stuff. I’d rather a hundred essays repeat ludonarrative dissonance 101 than someone feel they can’t write their own game criticism on their own blog. Retreading ground is an important part of learning I think, and the concerns I raise here are not at all because I don’t want people working through existing ideas. Just that it’d be nice if somehow it was easier to find the existing stuff.

3. In bringing up Matthew Burns piece I in no way intended to imply you can’t critique that piece of writing without knowing who Matthew is first. Simply that I found it interesting that newer game critics I follow seemed unaware of who he was. But that doesn’t mean their criticisms of it are necessarily invalidated! Similarly, I in no way was intending to flippantly write off (or even refer to) the concerns some voiced on twitter that that article seems to share similarities to Gita Jackson and Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s game review of Tinder. Apologies that was not clearer.

4. I think there is a way higher density of cool shit being written about games today than there was in 2010 so the kids are alright and this whole post is probably just me verbalising an entirely typical white dude feeling of obsolescence and thus really shouldn’t be read as any sort of authorial ruling on anything. I just hope the cool shit being written about today is still remembered come 2018.