Here's another one of those 'the problem with games journalism' pieces, this time from Greg Costikyan, founder of the indie aggregation site, Manifesto Games. Like lots of these pieces he asks, 'where is this industry's Pauline Kael?', while arguing that games reviews are not games criticism - they are merely a consumerist shadow of criticism. From the article:
Reviews are the inevitable epiphenomenon of our consumer society, writing to help consumers navigate the innumerable options available to them. They can be well or poorly done, but they are nothing more than ephemera. I'm sure the newspapers of early 19th century America ran reviews of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper; they are utterly forgotten, and should be, because by nature they were of interest only to the readers of the newspapers of the time. Contrariwise, Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is still considered an examplar of literary criticism.
I think he's brave to attempt an explanation of what criticism is - I'm not sure even Kael would have comfortably delivered such a definition in a couple of paragraphs; critics tend to obfuscate rather elaborate on such defining topics.
What Costikyan doesn't tackle is the presence, or otherwise, of an audience for the game criticism he envisions. Games writing may not have its Pauline Kael, but then neither does modern cinema.
