Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It

My course is a 200-level elective, which means I have to accommodate students who may have never done any college-level analyses of literature or art, so  it was a bit of an uphill struggle getting students to move beyond the central question at the center of every game review they have ever read ("Would I recommend this game?") and the central assumption behind every journalism story that mentions games in connection with the latest high school shooting or road rage incident ("To what extent can we use games as a scapegoat?")

Here is the comment I left on Play This Thing:

Jonsey515 writes:

The real purpose of criticism is to define how a particular piece fits into the popular culture, how it compares to other pieces of a similar type, whether it adds or detracts to our overall cultural experience, and what it might mean for the future of the form, regardless of whether it's a book, music, painting, game, or what have you

Those are all useful kinds of criticism, but don't forget representations of race, gender, and class; psychological crit (often but not necessarily centered around Freud); economic determinism (often but not necessarily centered around Marx), and close reading (such as Don Knuth's detailed analysis of the Crowther/Woods version of Adventure http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf, or Jeremy Douglass's excellent analysis of Shadow of the Colossus -- among several other games http://jeremydouglass.com/dissertation.html).

Whether a work is successful is certainly worth discussing. Even Play This Thing is presented on the assumption that a game discussed on this forum is worth playing -- see the apologetic footnote Costikyan added to his negative review of the "serious game" ICED. But it's perfectly appropriate to recommend a work (or to say "play this thing") in order to discuss its flaws.

James Portnow has a good essay on the differences between playing for fun and playing to learn, which emphasizes the advanced mental processes that lead to writing critical essays rather than the quick checklist that a reviewer needs to cover. http://gamecareerguide.com/features/473/playing_to_.php

John Hopson, writing for Gamasutra, argues that the games industry only values a narrow kind of academic research:

By the way, if the research doesn't include specific practical recommendations or a measurable impact on the final product, don't bother trying to sell it to the industry. From the average industry professional's perspective, there are only two things of value being said in a research presentation: the recommendations and their predicted effects. Everything else, the background research, the brilliant theoretical breakthrough, the clever development of the ideas, falls on industry ears like the "wah wah" noises made by Charlie Brown's teacher.

Hopson's formulation of what counts as worthwhile research is depressing in its candor, but it does explain the mercenary mindset of a busy professional who does not share the academic's joy in knowledge for the sake of knowlege. (There are, of course, scholars who study the therapeutic effects of personal writing, or the psychological impact of various texts and genres. And my own school offers an excellent MA program in writing popular fiction, which is in fact geared towards the needs of students who want to write their own historical romances, fantasy trilogies, sci-fi epics, etc.)

Hopson also criticizes scholars who choose to write about older games, or games that aren't top sellers -- without, perhaps, realizing that it generally takes months to write an academic article (since most of us also have plenty of teaching to do, and we often have to wait until the summer break to do our serious writing), and then the peer-review process also takes time.

Thank you, Greg, for bringing up this issue in this forum.