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:

1. 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)
2. 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…