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The Role of Criticism

In an interesting essay (thanks Jen Bekman for the link!) by Jonathan Jones argues, essentially, that he is right as a critic because he "feels it in his bones."

While that's a rather clumsy way to put it, it's true. Reactions to art are subjective, and critics are right mostly, solely, because they believe they are. But what's interesting to me is not their final judgment but the path by which they arrive there. And there for to say "I'm right because I am" is utterly uninteresting.

Jones is right that there is a need for criticism and judgment in art. There *is* good and bad; although we might disagree over which fits in what categories. But even "bad" art can tell us volumes about various fascinating forces at work in society, in the art world, in the artists' personality and mind, even in how we decide to judge art.

My approach to criticism is, I think, not really about identifying good and bad for the benefit of the consumer or the future of the art; I think I prefer criticism that takes a more sociological approach: why is this art bad, why is this good, what values do our judgments reveal? Why is this piece popular? Why does this apparently crappy piece of art resonate so powerfully with mainstream culture?

GTA III > Crash, Literacy, Education

Clint posted his essay on authorship last Friday, but it's taken me until now to read it, because, boy, is he wordy! :)

Here's the essential nugget (for me anyway):

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that � yes � if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player � more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) � with insight into that meaning, then yeah� it's art.

I happen to agree (if Clint's referring not to Cronenberg's Crash - a creepy meditation on sex and dismemberment - but the other one, a rather insipid and predictable attempt to survey race relations in Los Angeles). Think of how much ink was spilled in dissecting the game, how much people were awed and, in some cases, frightened by it, how people passionately defended their interpretation of it.

But one little phrase of Clint's I'd like to point out - something he tossed out but which to me seems key here. He has a high level of literacy with systems of interaction. This is terribly important. Games speak in their own language, and when you are comfortable with that language, then games can make sense to you, you can process them and absorb them and react to them. It's not just a matter of dextrousness or fingering facility. It's a matter of understanding that the game is built of these blocks of systems.

Just as children are taught to read - narrative is built in blocks of meanings; visual arts, too, are not necessarily intuitively appreciated. The *reason* that so many of what I would have once called low-brow mid-culture consumers appreciate Monet's waterlilies and Handel's Water Music is because those cultural forms, the language of classicism, have been so embedded in the west that we can understand them intuitively. When the Impressionists were first painting plenty of people thought them crazy, or degenerate, or both. Now imitations of their work hang in second-rate hotel rooms everywhere. We've tamed the language of what was once radicalism so that now it seems safe and normal.

Ebert - and not just him, many many people - have yet to learn the language that games employ. Gamers know it instinctively, although few are as self-aware and as articulate about what they know than Clint. but my question now is, ok, we're raising a generation of gamers who understand interactivity and systems; how come we are running out of good programmers then? Shouldn't this generation be ideally suited to become natural programmers? And yet every industry that requires engineers, programmers, or other system-builders is having the toughest time finding talent. Is it just a matter of boom time economy and too much work to go around?

Or is something broken?

Videogames, Art, Blah Blah Blah

I received an email from a well-meaning and earnest student who wanted to collect expert responses about whether or not videogames are art, and so on. How tedious. This debate doesn't even *exist* except possibly in the mind of Roger Ebert and overeager students. No offense. But can we just move on already?

It seems to me that the whole notion of trying to define "art" is, first of all, utterly irrelevant in our age. When vulgar homes display those ubiquitous prints of Monet's waterlilies, when insipid pop songs can be desconstructed, when the face of the Mona Lisa is used on keychains sold to tourists, when collectors pay thousands of dollars for the scribblings of a madman who has "found art" - it's a circus. It's like trying to define what "food" is when we have everything from seaweed extract to Velveeta.

There's no "art" anymore. Just categories of creation. And you can either enjoy it, or not. Just as food is simply something you eat. And let's be clear, there is good food and bad, horrible, awful, nearly inedible food.

Game Journalism is not the Only Journalism that Sucks

We all complain about how bad game journalism is (and always point to to a handful of the usual suspects as exceptions) but maybe that's just because we actually know about and care about the industry. A friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous!) forwarded me this story yesterday: Japan's lonely hearts turn to dolls for sex, company.

My first thought was, how the hell can you write this story and not mention the very famous RealDoll, which is an American product?

Because either the writer didn't know about them - which indicates a lack of simple Googling - or, more likely, because the story is better if it's cast as "Look how weird/sad/lonely/perverted Japanese man are - aren't we glad we're not like that?" In which case it may have been the editor who excised the writer's sentences about RealDoll. I guess "Some Men Like Sex Dolls" is not much of a story.

Gross.

Rock Stars of Videogames

I was flying home from the weekend in LA (where I didn't really go to E3, just sampled the afterparty and saw some friends) when I found myself next to Chris Hecker, whom I hadn't seen in a long time. We got to talking about why there are still very few recognizable names and faces in the videogame industry. He reminded me of the famous ad announcing the founding of EA, headlined, "Can Computers Make You Cry?"

Well, we're still struggling to answer that question, but take a look at the photo on the right - the founding members of a company that ambitiously and grandiosely called itself Electronic Arts. A name that defies the Eberts who don't see the art in computer and video games. And the photo itself says unequivocally, "Not only are computer games art, we are artists."

It looks like it could be a publicity shot for a moody rock band. The photographer has captured real personality here, individuals - dressed in dark clothes and seemingly passionately united under the aegis of a single goal.

With a few notable exceptions (you know who they are - Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto) - the industry has turned away from personalizing game development, from regarding the people who work on games as individually important. No, far better for a studio like EA to let the public see the studio behind the franchise rather than a handful of creative geniuses. The franchise is longer-lived that way, the studio system more stable.

The Role of The Critic

A.O. Scott had an amazing essay in the New York Times a few days ago in which he pointed out (or maybe "lamented" is a better characterization?) the fact that the critics had roundly panned Pirates: Dead Man's Chest yet that did not deter audiences from piling up to see the film. "What," asks Scott, "is wrong with you people?"

I was amazed at how nakedly petulant Scott seems at this outcome. You can almost imagine him stamping a foot. "Why, oh, why, won't you people just listen?" No one in his right mind would suggest that a critic's opinion ought to be a barometer of a film's success; and yet you hear it all the time in the videogame world, in an exchange in the forums that goes like this: "Such and Such game sucks." "Oh yeah? Then how did it sell over a million copies?" Oh, I don't know. Marketing? Availability? The fact that EB Games employees were told to suggest it to every kid, mom, uncle who came into the store that week?

Scott goes on to ask, if no one seems to listen to critics, then why do critics exist?

It's clear that critics are not the "voice of the people," even if they start out to act as one. Ebert, the most famous film critic although not the best, is perhaps the reigning example of a man who seems to put himself in a pedestrian audience's shoes. But after a decade or two of reviewing cinema, it must be difficult: the average movie-goer sees how many films per year? I'm not sure, but the average critic sees many, many times that. Such a glut of cinematic experience is bound to alter and inform your perceptions of good and bad.

Take game reviewing for instance. If you've played quite a lot of videogames, then something like The Godfather comes off as, well, prosaic. But say you're a college kid on a limited budget - you've got Halo and GT 4 or something, both of which you play frequently, and you're looking for a change of pace. You might reasonably enjoy The Godfather - and you would not be "wrong" to do so.

Critics exist for another reason - they are not barometers of success, not even predictors of my enjoyment in a film or game. They contribute to my understanding of a particular film in a larger context; they write one side (or really, several sides) of the dialogue I will have about the film. They point out what's interesting even in a shitty film and I can either agree or not. I enjoy reading my favorite critics - Anthony Lane, Susan Sontag, and yes, my dear A.O. Scott - even when I have little intention of watching the film in question. Their essays are self-contained and of interest on their own. They, too, contibute to the world of film.

That is the element that is missing from mainstream game reviews, with some very small exceptions. It's rare that I feel like reading a game review about a game just to deepen my understanding of videogames as a whole. I know that is not the reason most people claim they read game reviews; but it is mine.

Apparently, We Suck

GameDaily has really made a business of railing against itself lately. One wonders, then, what the point of its existence is. Games suck, people who write about games suck, game developers hate everything, etc. Originally I composed a long (and, to me at least, highly amusing) response referencing self-flagellation in the Philippines, among other things, but really, it's just too easy. Also, I promised I wouldn't complain anymore. So I'll just leave it at that.

Looking for Lester Bangs

Here's another article lamenting the lack of, in this case, The Lester Bangs of videogames.

Hate to break it to you, but Lester Bangs is dead. He died in 1982. When he was alive, Rolling Stone hadn't become the boob-laden commercialized sad rag it is now with an endless parade of one-hit wonders and Britney Spears clones on the covers. The Ramones were still playing. And alive.

Maybe there is no Lester Bangs of videogames because there's no Lester Bangs of ANY medium. Not anymore.

But let's dissect the article a little more. It's very easy to say there's no Big Important Critic of videogames when videogames themselves are not as big as films or music. You simply don't get famous writing about videogames. Because if you did, surely Chuck at Esquire would have known about Clive at Wired, who wrote a review recently of Jaws Unleashed that began:

The bikini-clad swimmers have no clue what's coming.

Deep beneath the surface of the water, I glide like a cruise missile of death, quietly circling my prey and picking my angle of attack. Then I sense an opening and bam: I shoot upward, sink my teeth into one wriggling leg, and begin ripping my prey back and forth. Blood mixes with the frothy water-bubbles as the shrieking begins, and pretty soon I'm snacking on yet another resident -- oops, former resident -- of Amity Island.

He also apparently doesn't know about the whole movement under the unfortunate moniker "New Games Journalism" and all its practioners who, although you may argue over the legitimacy of their project, do in fact attempt exactly what Klosterman longs for.

The problem is, no one really cares for the stuff beyond a small group of like-minded folks who are mainly writers and developers. Gamers, for the most part, don't care to read about how a game makes you feel. Without an audience, fine writers who style themselves critics languish unread on blogs or in tiny niche websites.

But I also think he's misunderstanding what videogames are. Klosterman quotes Steven Johnson saying that videogames are more like architecture, which is a very interesting point (and when was the last time you read architecture criticism in a magazine?). But Klosterman confuses architecture with action:

But there's one (rather obvious) difference between architecture and video games: Architecture is static. I live in a building that has fourteen floors, and that's always true. I can't manipulate the floor plan of my apart�ment or the number of bricks in the wall. What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation�he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future.

Uh... yeah, sort of. But outside of a play space like Second Life, actually, no player invents anything; she merely determines the sequence of certain events, and sometimes, the quality of those events. It's a very limited sort of freedom. The architecture that Johnson's talking about is the very code of the game, which is identical for everyone. We have different reactions to it, sure, but then, we have different reactions to films as well.

The difference really is why we want to read about certain writers' reactions to films but not about their reactions to games. So the answer is, there is a Lester Bangs, there are probably hundreds of them, but no one gives a shit.

New Game Editorials

I know SomethingAwful's two articles on the worst video game journalism of 2005 have been around for a little while now, but they do make for good reading, especially for us journalists. Zack Parsons makes a good argument that we're largely pretentious, whiney fans rather than anything resembling journalists.

Parsons' most significant point is the desire of so many gaming journalists to become celebrities. So many of us want to be recognized and certified and legitimized that we try to create a clever, likable persona. The writers Parsons names (many of whom are pretty big within gaming circles) write long-winded, self-adoring reviews and previews of games that do little more than paint themselves as ironic and clever arbiters of culture.

Grand Theft Auto "by City"

Nancy Grace recently used her no-nonsense attitude and sassy attitude to finally show them "video machines" who's boss (transcript, thanks Kotaku).

Besides the fact that the transcript, presented on a news network website, misspells "Eidos" as "Idos" and misidentifies "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" as "Grand Theft Auto: By City," I'd have to say that this segment added nothing to the discussion of video game violence whatsoever. For either side.