It’s Not Coming Back
Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics
Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics
Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics
Fortnite Battle Royale was the most widely played and widely discussed game of 2018. Just not among game critics. More than 200 million players had accounts, but somehow they didn’t fit into ‘the discourse’. Game journalists wrote their Fortnite articles, though mostly about the phenomenon, weekly tips, worried parents, Drake. Streamers and Youtubers kept up, but just as entertainment. Hardly any critics actually dropped in and took the game, the experience of playing it, seriously. What it’s like. What it even is.
It’s one thing to wildly overpraise and forgive the obvious faults of the most hyped game of the year, as with Red Dead. It’s something else to effectively ignore the actual biggest game on the planet. It’s not that I expected any particular critic to play Fortnite seriously. But when almost none of them did, I knew something was up. This wasn’t an individual blindspot. It was a collective shrug.
I’d seen something like this before. With The Sims, Minecraft, even Candy Crush. Huge games that were, and still are, wildly popular with non-gamers. Games that didn’t follow the logic of the hardcore, despite being quite challenging themselves. Games in which the traditional gamer values of mastery and flattery were thwarted by something less winnable and more lifelike. Sure, critics referenced them eventually, but they were more comfortable writing about them as culture, not as games you actually play. These games have never been central to games criticism, even as they have been to so many players in the world, because in the end most critics are gamers. Their interests are gamer interests. Their truths are gamer truths.
So when I heard critics make excuses about Fortnite all year long, saying “it’s not my thing” or “this doesn’t make me feel cool” or “I’m getting killed by children”, I thought: of course. When I saw critics balk at the cartoon silliness but rub themselves raw over PUBG and later Apex Legends, I thought: so you want games that look like military ass, that focus on the good guns, that you can win, got it. When I saw critics emphasize the social aspect over everything else, their precious culture, when I saw them shrugging off the actual game month after month, even as the comet landed and the rocket launched and Kevin the cube began to roam, even as Fortnite happened, and kept happening, I thought: lord, this takes vigilance, this is some serious shirking. And when I heard critics joke, “Where we dropping, boys?” as if that meant anything to them, I thought: and where did you drop? In the same old place, with your same old gamer games. Not Tilted, not Anarchy, but right back into your same old gamer self.
Here was a new generation of players who did not all speak the dead language of gamers. But critics weren’t listening. Their narrow gamer hearts weren’t interested. And I wondered: would critics actually know when something genuinely new showed up? Would they even care? A few places, like Eurogamer, took notice of Fortnite, but how could the rest when they barely even played the game? For reasons, reasons, they didn’t show up. They didn’t do the work. Critics simply failed Fortnite.
~
The thing is, as a critic, I failed Fortnite too. I engaged, I did the work, but I didn’t really show up. How would anyone know of this work when left unshared? I had reasons too, like other critics. Still, like them, I failed.
No critic is an island. And even if the mainland is a wasteland, a critic has to engage. Critics need a certain measure of isolation to do their work, and most game critics don’t even have that. But the isolation is only meant to be temporary. Criticism is ultimately a conversation, and I failed to enter that conversation in 2018. This isn’t something new with me. I’ve been slowly pulling away from games criticism for years. Staying on twitter preserved the illusion that I was still there, still in it. Even when I barely engaged. Even when I produced little new criticism.
My failure goes beyond disengagement. I demand vulnerability from game critics, but I still fail to bring it into my own criticism. I’m deathly proud and a control freak. I can’t seem to let down in writing. I can always feel my resistance. Again and again, I fail to tell the whole truth.
I’m more comfortable writing my anger and ideals than my sadness and fears. Even though the latter dominate my days, and especially my nights. I’m still so afraid of being wrong. I dread failure. And I feel the passing of time, irrecoverable, more intensely every day. Even now, here, I point towards these feelings without really expressing them. I don’t yet know how to write with all my voices.
Part of my truth as a player, perhaps a central part, is a profound loneliness. I’ve played games for almost 40 years. I’ve talked to people about them all along the way. But the games culture that has emerged online is something I don’t fundamentally recognize. I can’t square it with the rest of life I know. I can’t make sense of it.
I just don’t relate to other players. What they like and dislike, what they tolerate, how they play. Even those closest to me. Most of them don’t play games much, but when they do, I struggle to find common ground. I’m delighted whenever we manage it — my brother with Astro Bot, my wife with Tetris Effect and Subnautica — but when we don’t, it’s uniquely estranging. I so wish I enjoyed Mario Tennis Aces like Ellen did. I wish Tyler wanted to play Fortnite more. I wish I could understand, truly understand, why my friend liked Red Dead Redemption 2. With each of them, I want to share our experiences and connect, but it just doesn’t happen that often with games.
Games culture as a whole only makes me feel more alone. Its broad agreements, its lack of serious dissent, I find it all so completely alienating. It creeps me out, frankly. It looks to me not like a culture but a cult. The specialized language and rules, the separation of true devotees from everyone else, the zealous naming and culling of heretics, the worship of a specific past alongside the promise of some future deliverance, the way the faith is still dominated by men. I look at the games it lifts up, the Red Deads, the God of Wars, and I cannot find a place in them. I cannot accept them. I cannot give up my reality for theirs. Call it a cult, call it a con, I don’t believe in it, whatever it is. I want no part of it.
It’s not critics’ fault that games culture is like this, but they have a responsibility to push back on it, all of it, and not act as its priests, as enablers and legitimizers of this cult. But they don’t push and they do enable, and we all seem unwilling to face this collective failure. Every year I find it harder to trust critics who defend the state of criticism or want to explain away its failings. They circle their wagons at the slightest question from someone outside their clan. And I wonder: just who exactly gets to criticize the critics? Certain ‘professionals’ from the enthusiast press? Other designated ‘peers’? So where are their criticisms? I keep waiting, year after year, for something, anything.
When I left twitter last summer, it was to get away from this whole self-serving games scene as much as anything. Games twitter is neverending humiliation. The metrics grubbing, the peer jockeying, the paranoia induced, the deference shown, the steady stream of petty-ass tweets and subtweets, even from talented critics, the constant in-group stroking. This social environment feels designed to make you dislike everyone. People you might like if you met them offline. And who might like you. Because I was certainly not immune. I grew to dislike my own hard twitter voice. So incomplete, so lacking in vulnerability. I couldn’t blame anyone there who disliked it too.
~
In another world, this would be the point where I acknowledge my failure to engage and resolve to do better, to reenter the conversation of games criticism online, to be available to the discourse. But this isn’t that world. I have no interest in returning to games twitter. When I left last year, I immediately felt this tremendous lightness, this unburdening. I felt gratitude too, since I knew it was a privilege not everyone was in a position to feel. I told friends it was like the destruction of Alderaan. All these voices, suddenly silenced. It was wonderful. Both for my mental health and my writing. I’m just not someone who needs more voices in their head.
But even beyond twitter, games criticism isn’t a conversation I want to have anymore. It looks like madness to me. Certainly my loneliness as a player, my alienation from games culture, and my distrust of most game critics doesn’t help. But the real problem for me is how to be a person online. How to be a real, full, vulnerable person on the internet. How to tell my whole truth under these conditions. I still don’t know how to do it. I know I won’t figure it out from the shipwreck of games criticism.
Stepping away this past year, failures and all, has begun to restore my sense of things. Still, the toll is real, the truths often ugly. I still don’t recognize myself sometimes. The norms of games culture and its criticism are so completely off that I wonder if any sense of unhyped, unaddled sanity can ever take hold. Can we even imagine an unenthusiast press? It shouldn’t be unusual to criticize Red Dead, even harshly. It shouldn’t require such ire to pierce gaming’s bubble of adulation. It shouldn’t give me a stomachache to criticize game critics when they so obviously fail to hold games to account or push beyond their own narrow gamer tastes. It shouldn’t be a reach to take Fortnite seriously. There is a deep sickness in games culture, in what we demand, in what we defend, in what we deny. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk about this.
Are there other conversations to have around and with, but not solely about, videogames? Conversations that are critical and personal but not mired in the ruinous culture of gaming or the criticism that continues to provide its apologetics? I don’t know. I know I want to write about games as a part of life, one of many, while remaining clear-eyed about all the particular ways they provoke us. I know my own games criticism has begun to sound too familiar to my ear. Do anything long enough and the repetition will threaten you with hackdom. Position target in the center, pull the switch. It’s so easy to hypnotize yourself, do what you know, give in to the lull of days. But I want to believe in the possibility of change.
What is the way forward? I’m not sure, but for me it involves facing certain failures — my constrained voice, my lack of vulnerability, my silence about Fortnite. Or at least trying to. Fortnite, unlike most games, and certainly unlike Red Dead, embraces change. It may be the most protean game yet to capture so many hearts and eyes. And that’s what I want to wrestle with. I want to reckon with its happening. I want to tell you about its landscapes, a thousand losses, the particular contingency I found there. I want to talk about change.
~ April 23rd, 2019
Next — The Game of the Generation