The Future of Writing About Games

36 000 words was the length of the essay that taught me what writing about games could be 36 000 words is roughly 115 pages or at least it is when formatted into gamefaqs.com's characteristically bear presentation and it was in that raw text file that i read peter elliott's behemoth work talking ego an annotation as a kid i was the prototypical lurker on gamefaq's notoriously rambunctious forums it was the first place i learned about the concept of unbalanced characters the first place i heard accusations of playing a game the wrong way the first place i experienced that feeling of i thought these people liked this game why do they talk about it like they hate it so much but among the gamer-fueled fires of the mid-aughts there were glimmers of brilliance aimfax offered players the ability to write walk-throughs and left the definition of a walk-through exceedingly vague what exactly the writer chose to walk us through was up to them it's where for example i first ran across the secret seekers and their quixotic quest it's where i read joseph christopher's fantastically weird crowd pleasers guide to marvel vs capcom 2 which included suggestions on how to role play as different kinds of arcade legends the professional where the typical office worker type of attire formally introduce yourself as someone who'll either head an mvc2 official strategy guide an mvc2 website or a researcher on the psychological effects and or epileptic tendencies of prolonged exposure to video games ask some personal info from your opponent like family life working life love life etc and just beginning my lifelong affair with the games of fumitu uweda it's where i clicked on a file simply called eco plot story guide and found myself on the first of peter elliott's hundred-plus page thesis i will be the first to say that quantity of writing has very little relation to quality unless you're noah caldwell gervais it's exceptionally difficult to write tens of thousands of words on a video game and have it all be purposeful and on topic my scripts for example are usually eight to ten pages more than that and i start to wander but this essay was published in 2004 far before i ever thought about the optimal length of essay and what really captured my imagination wasn't simply the length but the topic a hundred pages on sheer gameplay theory was easy i read knife only walkthroughs of resident evil 4 that were twice that length so two was writing that dealt with solving a plot in my secret seekers video i mentioned an faq that questioned everything from the size of wander's horse to the genetic lineage of mono and her baby these were essentially the forerunners to the ending explained videos that now make up the gdp of a small country on youtube elliot's writing wasn't either of these really it couldn't have been eco is a powerfully antithetical work to these kinds of analysis it is radically simple with basic controls elementary combat and all of a paragraph of spoken dialogue [Music] there's no min maxed gameplay ideal of eco and little to grab onto in the realm of wild theories instead elliot latches onto and attempts to explain the true core of the game why do you feel so god dang much while you play it it's staggering to me that 12 years after i last read it i still remember ideas from eliot's essay incredibly clearly people erect buildings in order to domesticate the environment to make a domain of comfort and convenience out of an uncomfortable inconvenient wilderness but this castle almost seems to exist to make life miserable to move through the castle the children must outwit it must meet and prevail against every challenge this dangerous maze throws at them but wait a moment here outwitting the castles almost sounds as if we were treating it as a person in fact it very much sounds like the castle has assumed an adversarial role against the children and it has [Music] i mean is this not me half of my dang library of work is talking about the ideal of hostile architecture and elliot just throws it out in chapter five equally entrancing was the way he linked eco with other works all classics all undeniably in the canon pose the fall of the house of usher stoker's dracula even citizen kane for pete's sake and it wasn't the gaming inferiority complex style comparison insisting that eco was just as much art as any of those works instead that idea is implicit as impossible as it sounds his linking eco's conclusion to citizen keynes is unpretentious in his writing they are simply two artistic works with thematic parallels again if you're familiar with my work the influence should be clear but most of all what connected me to elliot's essay was his refusal to act as some detached observer in a powerful rejection of a the kids actually die at the end reading of the finale of eco he invokes not only the thematic and narrative weight lost in this interpretation but also his own faith he talks about how false this understanding of an afterlife rings based on what he understands and believes and while i'm certainly not a christian nor do i spend a lot of time thinking about afterlifes eliot's passion is enormously compelling he understands that the way he the way everyone interprets art is a conversation between the peace and his own lived experience elliott doesn't pretend that he was born in a test tube and as such can objectively assess its value his reading of eco makes him vulnerable and that was remarkable to me it still is a couple months ago i had the pleasure of being interviewed for heavy eyes video how we talk about games it's a look back at the critical games discussion that had shaped my his and many other video makers style it's what got me thinking about elliot's piece again in the first place however neither i nor heavy i'd actually get the best line in the video that went to another voice who you might be familiar with rasputin i think for a while there were a lot of people trying to find that thing under the stone that no one had talked about right for any given game what that actually is is perspective the thing about writing about games is it's so easy and often incentivized to be boring and usually it's practical boringness the writing is to a point and it expresses that point but still the vast majority of words i've read about games in my life can probably be sorted into two categories previews and reviews what this game might be like and what this game is like i've written a couple previews in my life it is not a flexible format meaningful criticism of the game positive or negative comes off as punching down you're playing an incomplete project and besides things could change before release what could you understand by seeing four minutes of a movie or two square inches of a photograph so instead it comes down to the basest form of interaction do the guns feel good yes no a review of course has the chance to do much more a full look at the game a more holistic understanding even if that full look has to be exhaustedly typed out after playing the game for many sleepless nights fantastically written reviews come out every day check out julie muncie's review of the last of us two for example an incisive look at the game's themes made even more impressive by the fact that reviewers literally weren't allowed to talk about half of it but reviews especially when coming from an outlet with a wide audience run into the same fundamental problem as previews by and large the reason we go to reviews is to tell us whether to buy the game or not and boy is this limiting i'm going to give you an example of a review that would not help me decide if i wanted to buy your game or not it's a review of the ios game infinity blade written by j nicholas geist in 2011 it starts like this infinity blade is a game about iteration about retreading old ground about the small changes that surface across endless repetitions i didn't read this review when it was originally published nor when i was trying to decide if i should purchase infinity blade up until the point that i read this i hadn't thought about the game in years i found this piece of writing because i saw someone else mention a review that was broken due to javascript updates and i was too curious to ignore it geiss describes the central conceit of the game challenging the god king dying and then the next generation taking up your sword it's a short review just over a dozen sentences but at the bottom of the page there's a button that says begin bloodline 2. infinity blade is a game about cosmetics about superficial changes to the way things look my new helmet is more gothic than my old helmet my new sword has a fire effect instead of an ice effect the text of the review itself begins to change not all at once but like a stream words trickling around existing sentences pushing some out of the way and surrendering to others it loses parts of the criticism that existed in the first bloodline it gains new insights explores new lines of thinking it ends the same way but to continue playing is to live the same life a little bit better a little bit smarter a little bit longer before changes start to happen faster the opening paragraph can't decide on itself the following won't settle on if it's noble or wretched to die like our fathers the last line remains the same ice review ebbs and flows reflects and looks forward the bloodlines of the review aren't a gimmick the way they parallel the game's halting progression grounds the review's profundity making digestible what could be completely opaque it is talking about infinity blade at the same time like the best art criticism can do it's showing that art in context and in conversation with the world around it advocates for so-called objective games criticism often bulk at the idea of bringing external context to a review judging a game on its own merits the argument goes cannot coexist with the acknowledgement of the world outside its virtual walls nothing could be further from the truth the game was not written designed nor programmed in a vacuum it will not be played in one to restrict yourself to the game's text and text alone to refuse to interact with the world that it was molded formed and consumed in that is what limits us look i get it sometimes you just want to know if the guns feel better and do maternal or if they feel worse you want to know if the larger arenas make the combat flow better or if they stilt it you want to know if you'll get 60 of enjoyment out of your time or if you'll wish you bought florence for 20 of your best friends instead those kind of reviews will still be around i promise but here's what i want to try and convince you of you know that feeling when you finish do maternal and a sweet guitar shreds over the end credits and you feel empty like you had a good time the entire way through there wasn't much you'd change and yet there's still that gnawing voice in the back of your head that says yeah what now what was the point of all this great criticism is the answer to that voice understanding a piece of art not as a simple solitary object but as part of our world makes everything feel like it means something no matter how grand or tiny this may sound like i'm giving games undue prestige i'm not most games are silly dumb fleeting this is about giving to yourself i lost countless hours to infinity blade played on my ipod touch under the desk in algebra 2. i enjoyed them all i thought critically about none geist's review retroactively changed the way those hours exist in my memory those endless generations fit into a larger narrative those lost hours are in a way found again in an essay titled games criticism is a kindness heather alexandra writes [Music] criticism understands that most of the games we play and movies that we watch are not world shaking they're not toppling regimes redefining our understanding of art or creating spiritual movements it cares if a thing is good or bad or important only insofar as it understands what it is doing to earn those qualities it treats games seriously irrespective of those qualities it does so knowing the inherent fragility of the medium and the limited impact of most works it highlights the beautiful rejects the banal and does so explicitly from the position of kindness the dumpster diver returns from the cultural heap and finds that one man's trash really is another man's treasure sometimes it becomes their treasure it becomes the thing that changes them forever the practical forms of writing about games the airy previews and workmanlike reviews serve a role they serve it well and after you've decided to spend your money after you roll credits on the game they convinced you to buy they're gone banished into that same emptiness that exists within you as the credits roll deciding to buy and play a game should be the beginning of your critical conversation with it not the end good writing will extend that conversation it seems like every few months we have the same conversation about game reviews should they factor our count into their assessment is a 100 hour game inherently better for the money than a two hour one because you get this much entertainment per dollar i as expected don't like this idea i don't judge my favorite tv shows on number of episodes my favorite songs on their runtime while i understand the desire to stretch one's money as far as possible this equation just seems like another way to throw the dial all the way towards games as product i have an alternative proposition although even more impossible to implement what is the hour count that a game lives in your memory how often do you think of it reference it dream about it with the first measure the worth of davey reeden's the beginner's guide isn't particularly high a game that lasts an hour and a half and costs ten dollars has a utility of basically six bucks an hour which isn't great but if that utility includes every time i've thought about the beginner's guide every time it's influenced my writing every time i've closed my eyes and seen that tower its worth is incalculable sometimes you will simply have that experience with a game you encounter it connect almost spiritually emerge enlightened but often at least for me lending a work of art part of your brain to live in only happens because of a brilliant piece of writing eco's castle has occupied my subconscious for over a decade because of how elliot illuminated its haunting beauty [Music] more recently carolyn petit's piece broken people broken worlds on again the last of us too will likely function the same way i came out of that game tired angry confused but when i read her musings on games as a dream space i feel a little more settled her writing helps me understand where my own thoughts may lie years from now yusuf cole's essay white supremacy black liberation and the power dynamics of gun violence function similarly the less cerebral and more historical it grounds the character relationships of mafia 3 in an essential conversation about power dynamics and it does so so powerfully that it essentially has reframed the entire way i view the game and makes it feel more essential with each passing day it's a vanishingly rare game that i feel like i get right away reading more people's expression of their experiences their analysis and conclusions is more than just a shortcut to understanding a good piece of writing functions as a guide showing you a path to walk by which you might come to your own destination with the game but you can keep going commodity isn't the end of the conversation with a piece of art and analysis isn't the end-all-be-all of writing about it both of these are just fragments of infinite potential when it comes to this kind of work and what excites me with games writing is we're just starting to use that potential the best piece of writing that's sorta about video games i've ever read is a short story published december 30th of last year in the new yorker simply called playing metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain by jamil jan kochai it starts like this first you have to gather the cash to pre-order the game at the local gamestop where your cousin works and even though he hooks it up with the employee discount the game is still a bit out of your price range because you've been using your taco bell paychecks to help your pops who's been out of work since you were 10 and who makes you feel unbearably guilty about spending money on useless hobbies while kids in kabul are destroying their bodies to build compounds for white businessmen and warlords but [ __ ] it's kojima it's metal gear so after scrimping and saving like literal dimes you're picking up off the street you've got the cash cochai's piece bears no resemblance to a review nor to an analysis in the way we typically think of them it's written in prose jagged but beautiful slipping between realities sneaking along the dirt roads past the golden fields and the apple orchards and the mazes of clay compounds you come upon the house where your father used to reside and it is there on the road of your father's home that you spot water your father's 16 year old brother whom you recognize only because his picture unsmiling head shaved handsome and 16 forever hangs on the wall of the room in your home where your parents pray but here he is in your game and you press pause and you set down the controller and now you are afraid [Music] in playing metal gear solid 5 the protagonist's world melts into the map and the world of the game his foggy childhood memories of afghanistan his imaginings of his father's previous life his picture of the family he's never met flow freely within the digital walls of the phantom pain my own memories of the game come back too confused and unsure by the strength of cochai's writing do i remember an apple orchard was there a house where someone could live did i carefully wait outside like he does or did i kick in the door guns blazing the main character's trance-like state leads to my own you look out the window and see your brother walking toward the house in the dark can you realize that you've been playing for too long you're blinking a lot too much the tightrope that this story walks seems impossible it is simultaneously written for people intimately familiar with metal gear solid 5 people who have never played a video game before and for the author alone it is so intensely personal it's almost overwhelming there should be a warning before you're so viscerally transplanted into someone else's head through these couple thousand words metal gear solid five gains a weight that all the codec calls and musical interludes in the world couldn't communicate to me the relevance of afghanistan as a local the people you're asked to tranquilize or kill outright the physical and emotional weight of a map included in the game box experiencing metal gear solid 5 through these eyes is like seeing a different game from the one exhaustedly dissected combed through for clues and flaws and extrapolated to what could have been these pages mean that when i return to metal gear solid 5 it won't be with the disappointment of what the game lacks it'll be with kochai's story ends not with a summation of his feelings on metal gear solid 5 or even a concrete conclusion to the story of finding his family in the game it ends with you as the protagonist as snake taking the sort of action inherent to games a crossing of a threshold a pass through liminal space and although the words stop at the bottom of that page the feeling of the piece continued unabated in my head for days playing metal gear solid five is written in second person for a couple pages it hints at what you do how you feel and then quickly and unexpectedly it leaves you to figure out who that person is it gives you a specific intimate story expands it to a game and then pushes you forward so you can reorient your whole universe of what metal gear solid can be much like games not every piece of writing will connect with every person of course it won't but when you find that one the words you've been looking for but couldn't find it feels like unearthing a vital piece of yourself and each time you expand your own perspective through someone else's insights the process gets a little easier and feels a little more natural and then maybe these ways of appreciating art that seemed so distant and unreachable get closer a little bit at a time and art itself feels a little less alien too and then you can find yourself in a world where everything the good and the bad the beautiful and the ugly can have meaning through the skills you've learned from the others who can do this weird subjective wonderful thing at least that's what happened to me [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so you're convinced you want to start elevating your reading about games where do you start well in addition to the specific pieces i mentioned in this essay there are a bunch of places that have been collecting good games writing for years places like dead led a pdf available on ichio that compiles some of the best stuff published on kill screen now that they're largely unavailable on that site and it also has notes from the authors and much more heterotopias my absolute favorite two topics video games and architecture combined in a beautiful and exceptionally well-written collection of zines a lot of my previous writing has been inspired by articles in heterotopias unwinnable another zine with a huge backlog of thoughtful pieces some of which feature people in this very video and finally critical distance simply subtitled where is all the good writing about games critical distance has been collecting great pieces of writing from across the internet for over a decade now there's your start now go read [Music] you

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 242,431

Keywords: writing about games, review, analysis, jacob geller, video essay

Id: Vr6pA15xuFc

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020

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