Why Games Criticism Never Went Mainstream
It’s because games are so utterly unlike other legacy forms of culture
Recently I was reading the daily newsletter of Dan Hon — which is fantastic, and y’all ought to subscribe to it — when he linked to this tweet by Gene Park, the games reporter for the Washington Post …
It’s an excellent point. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I’ve been doing long-form magazine feature reporting about video games since the late 90s, and for about six years in the mid-00s I wrote video-game criticism for Slate and Wired.
Back in the 00s, most writing about video games in mainstream mass media fell into two buckets:
- Anxious op-eds about whether video games would turn the Youth of Today into wall-eyed sociopaths (if they played first-person shooters) or lazy cretins who never finished high school (if they played nearly anything else)
- Short reviews of games, highly functional and focused on whether you ought to buy it; your standard one-to-five-star rating.
There was vanishingly little critical writing about games. When I say “critical” writing, I mean “critical” not in the sense of “poking holes in something”, but in the original meaning of literary criticism: i.e. writing that tries to make sense of a…
