Early into the video game critic’s career, the statement “I write about video games for a living” assumes the fraught, almost tearful, character of a confession. Even in its highest form (something like: the sifting of art and entertainment in search of truth or beauty), the critic’s profession is something of a superfluity for the species. Marooned on the desert island, the critic can only whisper “fair cop” when his co-survivors reveal the result of their vote on whom to eat first. Criticism is not a practical skill. It saves no lives.
At its worst, criticism is the blunt tool of the professionally envious (a “youthful corruption of power”, as Martin Amis put it). Even Auden admitted that the critic, by definition, must be a bit of a show-off. The philosopher Francis Bacon went further: critics are, he wrote in 1625, quoting Henry Wotton, mere “brushers of noblemen’s clothes”. But to pick video games for one’s subject? This is to enter new realms of childish indulgence. The former Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, who cut his teeth writing for a video game magazine, once wrote that saying you write about video games for a living is a bit like admitting you review Mr Men books professionally. It invites the bewildered follow-up: “So where did it all go wrong?”
Defending video games as a worthwhile subject during the medium’s emergent decades has been tough. The blockbusters are often flimsy carnivals of pyrotechnics studded with DOA dialogue. Perversely, they make great demands on the critic, who must frantically draw meaning and interest from what little is there. When an authentically interesting game comes along, the temptation for the honest critic is to overpraise and trip into advocacy of the medium (its own kind of well-meaning dishonesty). But no matter how scintillating the text, when the real world starts to tremble, when fascism begins to rise, when the bombs start to fall, when real lives and real rights are imperilled, the job of writing about virtual worlds is further undercut. Why waste our time focused on fictional quests when so much of the real world is in need of repair?
Perhaps this guilt is not the provincial concern of the video game critic, but part of a broad historical tradition? Maybe, as the 4th-century BC writer sat down to fine-tune a skewering paragraph about one of Euripides’s productions (“the way the actor tucked his genitals behind his legs lacked conviction”), he was thus moved to hurl his writing reed in a moment of self-hating disgust. Who has time for this shit anyway, when the Spartans are coming?
Lucas Pope’s 2013 game Papers, Please is an extraordinary study of nationalism, immigration and the way in which compassion can so often become strangled by red tape. In peacetime it’s a cautionary tale. This month it feels like a superfluous mirror. We already know how ugly we are.
Self-doubt is the common cold of writerly ailments. Doubly so for the critic of an emergent form. In his recent memoirs, Clive James recalls the pitying looks he’d receive from those who judged that he was wasting his talent on TV. A couple of years ago, in the aftermath of some world-shrinking tragedy, I turned to my friend and colleague, the Guardian games writer Keith Stuart, and asked why we bother writing about this stuff. His reply stuck with me. “People need joy,” he said. “We get to point out joyful things.” It’s a point of view echoed by John Updike, who, in constructing a set of moralistic rules for critics to follow, concluded: “The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys… and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.”
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