It’s Not Coming Back
The Worst Games of 2018
Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics
Interlude: The Other Failure of Game Critics
The Worst Games of 2018
5. Dead Cells
Sometimes your first impressions are wrong. I too found Dead Cells enthralling in the beginning. You stab and shoot and dodge and go: oh this. But the more I played, the less this mattered. What does this serve?
We still care too much about gamefeel. See Destiny. See also Celeste. There’s something icky about the way game critics fetishize it. That luscious feedback, that perfect extension of your will, that zone you wish to stay in forever. Gross.
I’m not here for your goodfeeling weapons. I’m here for enemies that fuck with my feelings. I’m here for encounters. But Dead Cells has no taste for that. Most of its enemies are locked to their tiny platforms, pacing like caged tigers, awaiting slaughter. It’s all discrete and exploitable. There’s no real dynamism. That precious this becomes rote. Nothing accumulates.
Except your cells, of course. Because Dead Cells never wants you to leave empty-handed. The metagame is all reassuring progress and new toys. It’s a people-pleaser wrapped in a hardcore skin. It’s roguelike comfort food, which goes against the whole point of randomness and permanent death. I don’t even care about getting good. I’m here for chance and uncertainty. I’m here to feel our contingency. And this game feeling, this, is not here.
4. Gris
I do not find it beautiful. I do not find it moving. I find it precious. Delicate but gaudy, restrained but excessive, fluid but deeply static. I find it so goddamn boring.
It asks me to admire it. Insists upon it even. But I don’t. My breath is untaken, my awe uninspired. It’s all so monotonous and hollow. It tells me to feel, but I do not feel. What a terrible thing: assumed feeling unfelt.
There is nothing to hold onto here. It strikes the most self-serious art game pose — I Am Become Grief, Destroyer of Girls — but dodges all specifics. Yet grief is always specific. Trauma is always specific. Depression too, even when it feels absolutely diffuse and general. Each is rooted in a specific self. But Gris ditches the self and gives us instead the everygrief. Or is it the everytrauma? There’s no telling
We cross tiresome landscapes, past uninspired iconography, through bland mechanics, and nothing lands. Nothing lands. The game just sits there, faceless and cool, daring you to question its beauty.
3. Soulcalibur VI
Ivy Valentine is the least of its problems. Her dominatrix whip play is a recognizable style if nothing else. But what are we to make of teenage Seong Mi-na’s pink silks and casual underboob? Or Talim’s my-first-bikini and fresh teen face? “Come on!” she says. Does the soul still burn?
Welcome back to the stage of history, player. Except it’s not the late 16th century, as the game would have it, or even the late 20th, when the stage was first set, but 2018. And in 2018, you can fuck off with that bullshit. It wasn’t ok before, but it takes a particular gall to double down now.
But that’s how these games are! But these girls kick ass! But it’s Japan! To which there can be only one response: anta baka?!?!
I do not trust this game. I don’t trust the sexist character designs. I don’t trust the forced drama of the reversal edge. I don’t trust the embarrassing writing in the campaigns. I don’t trust the ultra-conservatism of a moveset and gameflow that’s hardly changed in twenty years. I was there with my Dreamcast. I remember when this series was something new and exciting. Not this irrelevant has-been.
If some players want to reclaim Ivy or Taki or Sophitia, transform sexual objects into empowered subjects and make them their own, that’s great. Games avatars are flexible like that. But Soulcalibur VI is still sexist. And Soulcalibur VI still sucks.
2. Far Cry 5
It goes like this: run into a room, mouth gun sounds. Now turn a corner, mouth gun sounds. Alarm bell blares, mouth gun sounds. Here comes everybody, mouth gun sounds. You’re eight, except you’re not. Add twenty, thirty years. Look in the mirror. Mouth gun sounds.
Far Cry 5 is a shit game. Like, super dumb. This is obvious. It sucks in ways you’d expect: a detailed but dead world, a glut of rural and religious stereotypes, all the pitiful encounters with guns. But it also sucks in ways that surprise: racial inclusivity that’s actually erasure, dumb twist endings, even humiliating quotes on the loading screens. There’s this presumed wildness to it all that’s really just cover for its deep conservatism. It thinks it’s being provocative. It’s actually just stupid.
So the question is not: what is it? Or: is it good? The question is: why are you still playing? Why do you need another chaos box? Was the tropical island version not enough in 2012? Nor the Himalayan one in 2014? Did you really need the rural American flavor too? I know this isn’t your first rodeo. Chaos boxes were kinda novel and fun in the 2000s, but there’s nothing wild or crazy about them now, no matter how many grizzly bears named Cheeseburger you stuff in. Surely you have a higher standard for dipshittery in 2018. Besides, there are so many virtual ways to unwind and let off steam these days. So why are you still playing this?
I’ll tell you why: because you like high definition murder. You like it. It’s not an accident that the most violent shooters are so often on the cutting edge of graphical fidelity. They know what you want. And as your stunted adult imagination knows, mouth gun sounds just won’t cut it anymore. You need 4K fire and blood, bodies twisting and breaking at 60 frames per second. You need local color to give just enough specificity and grit to make each shot really land, to make sure your deadened senses feel anything at all. You especially need a charismatic villain to see you, recognize your violence, say you’re just like him. And then, absolve you. Because both of you poor souls have no other way to be in this fallen world. Except that he’s a videogame character and you’re a person.
Far Cry 5 is a cowardly game for the idiot and fool and bad little boy in each of us. Game critics have gone after every aspect except the dumbness at its heart. It’s so embarrassing. I’ve heard every defense at this point, every excuse. From both earnest conservative gamers and the apologist-in-chief of a progressive game site. It’s all the same. Nerdboy bullshit and mouth guns sounds.
But but but! Gamer please. Fucking next.
1. Red Dead Redemption 2
It’s a con, all of it. The staged world, the stock characters, the hollow story, the “good man” Arthur, the wretched missions, the stupid shooting galleries, the sulky masculinity, the blinkered whiteness, every masturbatory detail. The game believes in nothing, cares about nothing but its own con.
And we want to be conned. We want it. We love the lies. We love the con of videogames.
Videogame culture is humiliating.
It’s not every year that a game so hyped, so lionized, so slathered with superlatives is so plainly godawful. Stupid games like Far Cry 5 are near annual occurrences, but a game as bad as Red Dead Redemption 2 only comes along every generation or so. It takes a certain budget and a particular talent for self-delusion to really pull it off. Because if there’s one thing worse than a stupid game that revels in its stupidity, it’s a stupid game that doesn’t know it’s stupid. That instead imagines itself as something greater, something serious, even magisterial, something like Art. A game that cons not only players and critics but, finally, itself.
I can’t pretend to have any sympathy for it. I’m exhausted by cons, given our current reality. And in the end, cons are very hard to fight. They aren’t just singular lies. They are plural lies, contagious lies, deeply social lies. A con is a lie that requires widespread belief and complicity to work. It’s a mutual lie that depends, absolutely, on the faithful, on willing marks, their participation and investment. When most effective, a con is a generative lie, a lie that produces other lies. A lie that creates more liars. It’s a lie you desperately want to be true, so much so that it undermines the very possibility of truth. Because a con is fundamentally a lie about the world, and about the reality of yourself in it. It is, at heart, a metaphysical lie.
You can criticize a con all you want and still never get at the frame, the assumptions, the motivations that keep it going. Especially if the con is big enough, expensive enough, and ever so attended to by a complicit media. So instead of detailing every single lie in Red Dead Redemption 2, I want to ask a few questions in a sub-essay:
Though there is really only one question in the end: why do you love the con of videogames?
Maybe you don’t think videogames writ large are a con. Maybe you don’t think Red Dead Redemption 2 in particular is either. So what do you call something that looks this good and plays this bad? That details this much and means this little? That’s this technically impressive and also this anachronistic? That centers shitty white men and says this is just the way it is? That has you murder thousands and yet declares you’re still a good man?
Is this not videogames? Is this not a con?
collaborators
Games require your participation. This is known. But what are the stakes of that participation? At what point does your investment become complicity? Playing a videogame is a partnership in meaning-making, but how do you know when you can trust that partner? How would you even recognize a con? Consider the playing of games within broader games culture. Is the relationship not mutual, generative, contagious? Before even getting into the metaphysics of the virtual. At what point are you not just collaborating with a videogame, and with games culture, but are yourself a full-on collaborator?
Put another way: why do you want to believe RDR2 is not a con? What’s in it for you? Why do you need this game to be good?
It can’t just be what you want to be true. I wanted Dead Cells to be great because I enjoy roguelikes and admire how the company is organized as a worker collective. I wanted Gris to be great because I love metaphoric play and examinations of pain and being submerged in another subjectivity. I even wanted Red Dead to be great because I love westerns, I love ambitious worlds, and I love a good redemption story. Even for Rockstar. After all, I did once love GTA III and San Andreas. But actually, unfortunately, I don’t like Dead Cells. I don’t like Gris. And I hate Red Dead Redemption 2. I don’t want this to be true. But it is true.
This isn’t just a taste thing. I don’t think the con of RDR2 is that controversial. I think saying it matters is the problem. So what if it’s full of lies? The it’s just a game defense jumps to the tip of every tongue. But what actually happens to you when you play a videogame? Where does all that heat come from, all those gaming emotions? How do you feel when you look out on the landscape? When you talk to those in your camp? When you shoot someone in the face? You can’t feel something about one aspect and not the others.
Somehow our guard comes down. Perhaps because it’s just a game. Sure it is. But it doesn’t end there. Things are activated within us. Things we carry back into the world after the game. Which is not to say games makes people violent or anything reductive like that. But it does mean we’re vulnerable when we play. Not just to the game but to ourselves, to things lurking within us. Our beliefs, our needs, our fears, our very way of being is at play. Every game implicitly asks: how should a virtual person be? So why wouldn’t Red Dead’s answer matter?
playing along
The truth is, I think most gamers totally relate to Arthur. He’s a character without much character, which is exactly what players are encouraged to be. They know something isn’t quite right, but they keep following along. They can’t muster the gumption to insist on anything different. They know Dutch is a con artist, but they need the con to live. Gamers are in too deep to turn back now.
Like Arthur, you don’t need to be a true believer to perpetuate the con. A con relies on skeptics as much as the faithful. Those who remain just suspicious enough, just aware enough to convince themselves they’re not being conned. Even as they go along with it. You tell yourself: I see what’s going on here, I see the faults, I’m no fool. Even as you mount your internal defenses, justify your actions, and play along. Do this long enough and you become the best mark of all. The mark who thinks they’re in control, who can quit anytime. Complete self-deception comes from thinking you’re un-con-able. Sure, you might have a modicum of self-awareness. Just not enough to make a difference.
The entire game invites this. Like the skeptic, Red Dead Redemption 2 has just enough self-awareness to seem smart but no courage to actually change anything. It’s not weird or revolutionary or even valiantly slow. Its unwieldiness, its supposed ‘resistance’ is meaningless. To read any of its quirks as significant, you have to want this to be true. You have to want to believe. And you have to ignore what a reactionary game it actually is, the worst since BioShock Infinite.
Dutch, like Comstock before him, though with a more self-serving inclusivity and without all the quantum theory, hails from the same era of frontier grifting. Let us seek a promised land together, a final refuge, and we only need to shoot thousands to get there. That it proves false is nothing to hang your hat on. That was not the lesson here. It was still you who pulled the trigger. You who took the pleasure. You who still believe. Because Dutch’s con — necessary violence as a path to freedom — is the videogame con.
the american con
You see where this is going, right? Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018. And in 2018, you can’t talk about cons without talking about the con that is America. With its conman president, enabled by the con that is conservatism, selling the con that is the American Dream. It’s an old story, one that Red Dead thinks it’s in on. The con of the frontier, the con of settlers, the con of whiteness, the con of exceptionalism. Necessary violence as a path to freedom. The con of freedom.
Defenders might say Red Dead Redemption 2 is about this very American con. It’s not. If it were, it wouldn’t center shitty white men. It wouldn’t use Native characters as props for white plots. It would have actual cogent criticism embedded in its structure rather than all this wasted extravagance. It wouldn’t have dead eye. It wouldn’t be a shooter at all. It would explore alternative mechanics. It would not mourn.
It is here, between its seeming subject and the actual experience of playing it, that we have the heart of Red Dead Redemption 2’s con. We have white american outlaws and traditional gamers, both sick with empire. We have collaborators with the systems that enable their delusions. We have pain at the expense of everyone who is not us. And in this particular moment, that makes RDR2 not only the worst game of the year, not only the worst game of this generation, but an active contributor to the all-consuming falseness eating our world.
Replace the cowboy hats with MAGA hats, and it becomes a little clearer. This is a family not of outlaws but of reactionaries. There’s nothing radical or courageous about them. The entire tone of Red Dead reflects this current conservative moment, the con being perpetuated. Your main man Arthur isn’t even a special case. Sure the world has plenty of dumb loyalists like Bill and charming young dipshits like John, always claiming “I don’t have a choice”. But there are just as many Arthurs out there in red caps as racist fucks like Micah. Not true believers but sad sacks gone sour. With more sulk than bile, longing for a past that never even existed. And these Arthurs, like so many gamers, don’t even care anymore that it’s a lie. They gave up responsibility for the truth a long time ago.
What does it mean to long for a lie? Where does it end? Especially when, at most, what you’re longing for is a feeling. Well, what you remember of a feeling. Hasn’t anyone told you the bad news, sweetheart? It’s not coming back. Not the old west, not your white stories of America, not frontier or freedom. And not Soulcalibur or Far Cry 2 or Rockstar’s heyday either. None of it’s ever coming back. Certainly not your lost feeling. It’s just as your conservative heart fears. Nothing will be made great again. Because past greatness is a con. And there is no again.
~ March 28th, 2019
Next — Interlude: The Failure of Game Critics