Are You Passionate Enough About Games to Love Them Uncritically?

The recent controversy about this review of Uncharted 4 has me thinking again about the pressure toward consensus in video game criticism, the pressure to evaluate games through a particular lens that is hardly the only interesting or worthwhile lens through which to consider games and our experiences with them. 

When I first started seriously reading GameSpot in the late 90s and began to consider the possibility of writing about games myself, one of the qualifications for such a career seemed to be “a lifelong passion for games.” At the time, this made sense to me. Why would anyone who doesn’t love games want to write about them, and why would people who are interested in game reviews want to read reviews by people who aren’t passionate about games? I love games! I can do this! 

But now when I think back, I see all the assumptions that are built into this. How does one demonstrate a passion for games? Well, often a large part of it is in expressing an admiration for some games that have become venerated classics. By showing that you *understand* why Super Metroid or Ocarina of Time or Starcraft are the classics that they are.

But of course an appreciation for games as a medium, a belief in their potential, can reveal itself just as much in breaking these classics down and offering perspectives on how they fail as it can in chiming in with the sea of voices that sing their praises. Yet the culture of legitimized, “enthusiast” gaming discourse often self-selects to some degree for perspectives that reinforce the conventional wisdom about which games are great. Can a person who openly admits to hating many games that are considered classics hope to be hired by one of the major gaming sites? Maybe, but it certainly doesn’t help your chances. 

To me, there is almost nothing worse for us as lovers of games than the tendency toward sameness and consensus in video game criticism, and the subtle ways (Are you passionate about games?! I can see by your love of all these AAA games that you are! You’re hired!) and the more overt ways (You dared to trash Uncharted 4, a game that is simply known and understood to be exceptional? You should be fired!) in which this tendency is reinforced. I caught myself last week still feeling beholden to this idea myself, protesting on Twitter that I actually did like Uncharted 4 rather than letting my criticism speak for itself and letting people come to their own conclusions about whether I “liked” the game or not, as if announcing that I “liked” this particular game indicates that I “like” games and therefore am qualified to talk about them. 

Overwatch is out this week, and look, I find it superficially appealing. I’m interested in playing it. But I also feel like it has already joined the pantheon of games that are just known and understood to be exceptional. In a better games criticism world, I’d be looking forward to a range of perspectives on the game as reviews come out, perspectives that challenge my own assumptions, that approach the game in wonderfully different ways and in doing so, get me to think about Overwatch and games in general in wonderfully different ways. And of course I expect that those perspectives will be out there, but perhaps not represented so much in the initial wave of reviews from enthusiast sites. And if anyone in that initial wave dares to commit the crime of thinking differently about the game, maybe they’d better be prepared to have people calling for them to lose their job.