Over at an interesting new blog called Intelligent Artifice (not a great name, what can you do?), a mini-rant on academic game criticism. Having written a Masters thesis digging (insufficiently deeply, in my estimation!) into narrative structure, the imagination, and video games, lemme kick in a couple of brief observations about academic game criticism.
No, wait. Lemme instead kick in brief, ill-thought-out, resentful sound bites about said criticism.
1) The majority of critical writing on any topic is either trivially correct or wrong. A lot of insightful things are written every day, but as a percentage of the total written output of academics the world over, those insights amount to nearly nothing.
And so but:
2) Learned writing is necessary. It is the only place to find certain ways of seeing, certain thoughts expressed. Same as novels: there's only one Leo Bloom (unless you count The Producers, which right now I don't).
3) Most games are terrible. Horrible, lame, derivative.
4) Critics who can't tell a bad game from a good one need to play more games and think more about them.
5) There aren't enough theorist/practitioners yet to generate a quick feedback cycle between clever theory and experimental theory-driven games. Eric Zimmerman is an example of the kind of theorist I'm thinking of (though for whatever reason, Rules of Play leaves me underwhelmed - it's a good book, but somewhat dull. More on that later). Zimmerman's games are motivated by an artist's interests, and a theorist's. That's something we'll see more of, and that will be good.
6) Most game scholars can't write well. But this is true of most human beings. In scholars' case, it's a matter of game criticism being either too street-cred-obsessed, too jargon-riddled, or just plain uninspired. And yes: my thesis has a bunch of the first two problems, and (I think) a nontrivial but less egregious dose of the third. The ideas in the writing will I hope!! outstrip their too-brief, too-vague presentation.
We'll see.
7) Just because Chris Crawford says it doesn't make it so. The man is clearly intelligent, one of the most original thinkers in game design. But he sees his Big Task ('interactive drama') as Joycean (i.e. he feels he has to reinvent electronic text to make up for the shortcomings of the existing possibilities), and he's wrong. Joyce was wrong, too - there was no need to reinvent the novel. He just did it, and we're better for it. The difference is, Joyce could do it.
8) Happy fucking New Year!
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Posted by: pangaea | 25 January 2006 at 07:57 PM