confessions of a part-time game critic

I was walking around Everett, Washington today, on my way to a job interview, and thinking about games criticism.

(You've been to Everett before, even if you think you haven't. There are a fair few towns scattered around the United States that are clone-stamped Suburbs, chunks cut straight off the block of some larger ur-town. Nobody who works there lives there, and vice versa. They feed a nearby city and eschew an individual identity. I've seen worse than Everett, like Council Bluffs outside Omaha, but being there still feels like you could be anywhere.)

As far as I can tell, there are three things holding video game criticism back at this point in time.
1) There's no money in it.
2) There's no audience for it.
3) It's one of the only forms of criticism that I'm immediately aware of that requires an additional level of acquired, exclusive skill before it can be practiced.

The third point's the mildest, but it's significant. To practice film criticism, you first must be able to sit still for two hours. To be a food critic, you first must be capable of digestion. To be a games critic, you must have a reasonable facility with the operation of a single particular software program, the skills from which will not necessarily transfer from one program to another, and after that you have to be a passable writer.

The first's probably the biggest. Virtually everyone I've known who works in games criticism uses it as a side project, a resume-builder, or as a springboard towards a job in public relations, marketing, or games development. It isn't a life position, nor should it be at this point in time. There isn't someone at, say, the New York Times whose entire job is long-form, thoughtful, but most importantly highly visible games criticism; there's no common influence, no big name in the field.

I often bring up Pauline Kael when I discuss this with people, and while it's not a perfect comparison--a lot of film theory and terminology is still sneaking into games discussion when it arguably shouldn't, just because it's the closest and most influential medium--it reflects the absence, and the need, for some games critic to climb above the pack. Mainstream cultural acceptance isn't worth pursuing for its own right (it's been thirty years and most major newspapers still seem determined to ignore games out of existence), but the side benefit thereof is the development of common ground. There isn't a film critic alive who hasn't read Ebert, for example, and that shapes the genre of film criticism in an important way. There is no single games critic who inspires other game critics; it's all a bunch of often-underpaid nerds who are doing it to kill time or fill space.

The closest thing to Kael that games writing has yet produced is probably Kieron Gillen, but the writers he inspired flamed out and went away... and thankfully so, because those were the "new games journalism" guys and they took most of the wrong lessons away from pieces like "Journey into the Cradle." In good criticism, the author is a presence but the subject remains the work being criticized, and "new games journalism" mistook the author and his reaction for the subject. I still have a standing date, if Tim Rogers and I ever end up in the same building, to call him a douchebag and push him down a running escalator.

And finally, there's no audience for long-form, thoughtful games criticism, because we've gone twenty years without it. There are exceptions here and there, like Rock Paper Shotgun, but most of the gamers I know are actively suspicious of games journalism, and rightly so. I've done my time getting martinis poured down my neck until a C+ game turns into a B, and I'd be suspicious too. Most of the money that keeps a games site alive is coming from the companies that produce the products the site is reviewing, via advertising, and that gives marketers a club they don't mind wielding.

One of the projects I sometimes think about is crowdfunding a games site through Kickstarter and Patreon: no ads, no banners, just thoughtful critics who buy all the games themselves, send all the "swag" back, and can afford to make games writing their day jobs. I don't know if it would work, or who I'd hire, but it's an idea in the back of my head that never quite seems to go away.