I have been neglecting this blog in recent months. My last post was written in fits and starts over many, many weeks. I’ve been preoccupied with other things and, like many people right now, my productivity has ebbed and flowed. I haven’t stopped writing, and I certainly haven’t forgotten about this blog, but I confess that I’ve slightly given up on writing so comprehensively about every book I finish. Most of my time and energy in writing has gone towards trying to write a book about video games. (The subject is a bit more specific than that, but I don’t want to give the thing away just yet.)
This is something I always thought I could do. I have been playing computer and video games since I was able to do anything at all. I have a lot of ideas on the subject. But it’s also quite difficult, not least because I never thought I wanted to write non-fiction. In fiction you can more or less do whatever you want, but in this other thing the problem of imposter syndrome sometimes seems (to me at least) to be overwhelming. How much do I need to cite? At what point does a generalisation become intolerable? Am I supposed to anticipate every potential objection or counter-argument in advance? Is my authority worth anything at all? Is it worth trusting my own experience, or is it all just, like, my opinion?
Of course in asking all these questions I forget that I’ve spent years pottering around on this blog, actually doing all the non-fiction writing I am supposedly so worried about. But I still feel like I’m trying to un-learn all the habits of supposedly serious writing that I learned at university. I studied English Literature, which teaches a mode of formal discourse that is useful now only in the abstract, and mostly quite worthless in terms of creating something worthwhile outside of academia. The problem is basically one of tone. It’s one of what kind of book am I trying to write.
I know what it’s not. It is not a history of games, and it isn’t an academic treatise. There might be a thesis, but it’s not a TED talk. I want it to describe what it feels like to encounter and experience games. I don’t want to try to second-guess player motivation from a distance, and I don’t want to study game design in the abstract, as if it were secretly the most interesting part of games. Above all I don’t want to fight battles on behalf of an imagined movement. There is no shortage of books arguing that games are (or aren’t) worthwhile, either as art or as tools for productivity or creativity or brain longevity or mental health. Some of these are quite good. But it seems to me like the arguments for the quality of games are omnipresent and overwhelming for anyone who cares to look.
It’s strange, though, that ‘books about games’ are relatively rare. I know that there popular works of non-fiction on this topic, but I’m being a bit more specific: I mean this in the sense of ‘books about particular games’, and ‘books that take a thematic approach to what games do and how’. There are some interesting exceptions: You Died: The Dark Souls Companion by Keza McDonald and Jason Killingsworth comes to mind. There’s also the Boss Fight Books range of short-ish texts that typically focus on an author’s experience with a single game. But for the most part, books about games either fall into one of a few categories. You might get a general record of an author’s life in gaming that argues for the experiential benefits of games; or you might get a semi-academic thesis about games, often supported by evidence from psychological or sociological studies; or you might get a potted history of game development. Or some combination of the above.
Which is fine. Some of these books are very good. But there aren’t many books of cultural criticism applied to games. Take the question of violence in video games: there are plenty of books which argue the case one way or the other about whether this is ‘harmful’ or not. It’s much harder to find books that forego this angle in favour of taking a long, hard look at the games themselves; that consider what it really means for a game to be called ‘violent’ in the first place, or why violent games can be satisfying and horrifying and amusing all at once. Too often what it feels like to play violent games becomes immediately subordinate to the question of what these games are supposedly doing to our brains, to our sensibilities, and to our sense of right and wrong – as if players weren’t aware of this in the first place – as if the effects of any work of art could only be considered by judging how people behave around it.
Games are often portrayed as a sort of inscrutable ethical problem for modern society, as if they weren’t the product of human imagination at all. Often an accessible book about games will come loaded with disclaimers and framing devices intended to put the reader at ease, to reassure them that what they’re about to encounter won’t hurt them. It feels like there aren’t many books which try to take us inside specific games, to show us how they work, and to make the reader feel how they make the player feel.
And that’s odd, in a way, because this kind of game criticism is omnipresent online. In the weeks after a major release, every gaming website will have a whole buffet of hot takes available. People are keen to produce stuff to support their favourite titles, sometimes for years afterwards. To pick a random example, the Mass Effect games are still enormously popular, and have spawned all kinds of novelisations and comic book spin-offs. Doubtless you can still find hundreds of thousands of words of opinion out there about why those games are good. But I don’t think anyone has written a book about Mass Effect.
You could argue that this is not especially unusual. Any of the following arguments could apply:
cultural criticism is best left to specialist magazines and journals
people who play video games do not (for the most part) read a lot of books
people who don’t play video games don’t want to read about games
people in general don’t want to read books about media which they aren’t likely to experience themselves.
There is a sense in which the most successful games of this sort belong to the fans foremost. The culture that grows up around big games is fan culture. Movies have something of the same thing — especially since the Marvel and Star Wars movies exploded in popularity again — but that’s only one wing of the superstructure that is film culture. There are whole other wings dedicated to serious cinematic avant garde, to art films; you could spend a lifetime studying Hong Kong cinema and barely know a thing about Bollywood, and vice versa. Which is fine because film caters for taste at all levels. There are popular film magazines and blogs, serious journals about film, and occasionally works of critique that bust through into the mainstream: I’m thinking of stuff like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, about the director of the same name; and Room 237, about some of the more outlandish theories that have grown up around Kubrick’s film of The Shining.
Granted, those examples were only moderately successful. They’re semi-popular but not exactly mainstream. But my point is that it’s inconceivable for me to imagine something similar coming out of the video game community. Whether it’s Ready Player One or the latest Netflix documentary High Score, games are stuck retelling their own histories from scratch each time. Which is not to say that new and fascinating stories can’t be brought to light — but so often games media aimed at a general audience begins with a long, laborious retread of game history.
There is very good, very specific stuff out there, but it’s hard to find. Video games are very good at reaching people who already play games. Many game critics are good at the same thing. But neither are very good at bringing the most interesting aspects of games to people who have no prior interest. The Beginner’s Guide is one of my favourite games of all time, and I think it’s one of the finest ‘games about games’ ever made; but so much of it is ‘inside baseball’ of the kind which would be incredibly difficult to explain for someone not already steeped in it. YouTube is increasingly a great source for insightful video essays about games that go far beyond ‘hot take’ culture, but in a similar way, it’s kind of impossible for an audience to find any of this stuff if they’re not already out there searching for it.
Is there a way out of this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s worth a shot.
I have been neglecting this blog in recent months. My last post was written in fits and starts over many, many weeks. I’ve been preoccupied with other things and, like many people right now, my productivity has ebbed and flowed. I haven’t stopped writing, and I certainly haven’t forgotten about this blog, but I confess that I’ve slightly given up on writing so comprehensively about every book I finish. Most of my time and energy in writing has gone towards trying to write a book about video games. (The subject is a bit more specific than that, but I don’t want to give the thing away just yet.)
This is something I always thought I could do. I have been playing computer and video games since I was able to do anything at all. I have a lot of ideas on the subject. But it’s also quite difficult, not least because I never thought I wanted to write non-fiction. In fiction you can more or less do whatever you want, but in this other thing the problem of imposter syndrome sometimes seems (to me at least) to be overwhelming. How much do I need to cite? At what point does a generalisation become intolerable? Am I supposed to anticipate every potential objection or counter-argument in advance? Is my authority worth anything at all? Is it worth trusting my own experience, or is it all just, like, my opinion?
Of course in asking all these questions I forget that I’ve spent years pottering around on this blog, actually doing all the non-fiction writing I am supposedly so worried about. But I still feel like I’m trying to un-learn all the habits of supposedly serious writing that I learned at university. I studied English Literature, which teaches a mode of formal discourse that is useful now only in the abstract, and mostly quite worthless in terms of creating something worthwhile outside of academia. The problem is basically one of tone. It’s one of what kind of book am I trying to write.
I know what it’s not. It is not a history of games, and it isn’t an academic treatise. There might be a thesis, but it’s not a TED talk. I want it to describe what it feels like to encounter and experience games. I don’t want to try to second-guess player motivation from a distance, and I don’t want to study game design in the abstract, as if it were secretly the most interesting part of games. Above all I don’t want to fight battles on behalf of an imagined movement. There is no shortage of books arguing that games are (or aren’t) worthwhile, either as art or as tools for productivity or creativity or brain longevity or mental health. Some of these are quite good. But it seems to me like the arguments for the quality of games are omnipresent and overwhelming for anyone who cares to look.
It’s strange, though, that ‘books about games’ are relatively rare. I know that there popular works of non-fiction on this topic, but I’m being a bit more specific: I mean this in the sense of ‘books about particular games’, and ‘books that take a thematic approach to what games do and how’. There are some interesting exceptions: You Died: The Dark Souls Companion by Keza McDonald and Jason Killingsworth comes to mind. There’s also the Boss Fight Books range of short-ish texts that typically focus on an author’s experience with a single game. But for the most part, books about games either fall into one of a few categories. You might get a general record of an author’s life in gaming that argues for the experiential benefits of games; or you might get a semi-academic thesis about games, often supported by evidence from psychological or sociological studies; or you might get a potted history of game development. Or some combination of the above.
Which is fine. Some of these books are very good. But there aren’t many books of cultural criticism applied to games. Take the question of violence in video games: there are plenty of books which argue the case one way or the other about whether this is ‘harmful’ or not. It’s much harder to find books that forego this angle in favour of taking a long, hard look at the games themselves; that consider what it really means for a game to be called ‘violent’ in the first place, or why violent games can be satisfying and horrifying and amusing all at once. Too often what it feels like to play violent games becomes immediately subordinate to the question of what these games are supposedly doing to our brains, to our sensibilities, and to our sense of right and wrong – as if players weren’t aware of this in the first place – as if the effects of any work of art could only be considered by judging how people behave around it.
Games are often portrayed as a sort of inscrutable ethical problem for modern society, as if they weren’t the product of human imagination at all. Often an accessible book about games will come loaded with disclaimers and framing devices intended to put the reader at ease, to reassure them that what they’re about to encounter won’t hurt them. It feels like there aren’t many books which try to take us inside specific games, to show us how they work, and to make the reader feel how they make the player feel.
And that’s odd, in a way, because this kind of game criticism is omnipresent online. In the weeks after a major release, every gaming website will have a whole buffet of hot takes available. People are keen to produce stuff to support their favourite titles, sometimes for years afterwards. To pick a random example, the Mass Effect games are still enormously popular, and have spawned all kinds of novelisations and comic book spin-offs. Doubtless you can still find hundreds of thousands of words of opinion out there about why those games are good. But I don’t think anyone has written a book about Mass Effect.
You could argue that this is not especially unusual. Any of the following arguments could apply:
cultural criticism is best left to specialist magazines and journals
people who play video games do not (for the most part) read a lot of books
people who don’t play video games don’t want to read about games
people in general don’t want to read books about media which they aren’t likely to experience themselves.
There is a sense in which the most successful games of this sort belong to the fans foremost. The culture that grows up around big games is fan culture. Movies have something of the same thing — especially since the Marvel and Star Wars movies exploded in popularity again — but that’s only one wing of the superstructure that is film culture. There are whole other wings dedicated to serious cinematic avant garde, to art films; you could spend a lifetime studying Hong Kong cinema and barely know a thing about Bollywood, and vice versa. Which is fine because film caters for taste at all levels. There are popular film magazines and blogs, serious journals about film, and occasionally works of critique that bust through into the mainstream: I’m thinking of stuff like Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s De Palma, about the director of the same name; and Room 237, about some of the more outlandish theories that have grown up around Kubrick’s film of The Shining.
Granted, those examples were only moderately successful. They’re semi-popular but not exactly mainstream. But my point is that it’s inconceivable for me to imagine something similar coming out of the video game community. Whether it’s Ready Player One or the latest Netflix documentary High Score, games are stuck retelling their own histories from scratch each time. Which is not to say that new and fascinating stories can’t be brought to light — but so often games media aimed at a general audience begins with a long, laborious retread of game history.
There is very good, very specific stuff out there, but it’s hard to find. Video games are very good at reaching people who already play games. Many game critics are good at the same thing. But neither are very good at bringing the most interesting aspects of games to people who have no prior interest. The Beginner’s Guide is one of my favourite games of all time, and I think it’s one of the finest ‘games about games’ ever made; but so much of it is ‘inside baseball’ of the kind which would be incredibly difficult to explain for someone not already steeped in it. YouTube is increasingly a great source for insightful video essays about games that go far beyond ‘hot take’ culture, but in a similar way, it’s kind of impossible for an audience to find any of this stuff if they’re not already out there searching for it.
Is there a way out of this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s worth a shot.
