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Word ScienceThere’s something I want to add to the recent discussions about the state of writing about games. To begin with we’ll need some background, so take a glance at this much-discussed article by Esquire’s Chuck Klosterman, and this response from Wired News’ Clive Thompson.

There’s something I want to add to the recent discussions about the state of writing about games. To begin with we’ll need some background, so take a glance at by Esquire’s Chuck Klosterman, and from Wired News’ Clive Thompson.Towards the end of his response Thompson begins to touch on what I think is the real issue behind the state of games writing, when he says: “Do the math: A serious RPG or first-person shooter or strategy game might take 40 or 50 hours to complete. Even if serious critics don’t have time to finish a game, they ought to spend at least 10 hours to experience its complexity. So ask yourself this question: If movies took 50 hours to watch, would there be any movie critics?”

Thompson says not, but he’s wrong. After all, my girlfriend regularly sits down to watch entire seasons of Buffy at a single sitting, and she’s not the only one. People are always insane enough to indulge themselves completely in something they want to love.

Hell, I’ve sat through eleven hours of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle in an squalid arthouse cinema because I wanted to know more about films. I’m certain that even if all films were that excruciating there would still be a handful of folks who would want to see them and write about them.

Nevertheless, Thompson goes on to expand the point into a more useful conclusion: “How exactly would a single critic remain authoritative? Pauline Kael watched, like, 10 movies a week. You couldn’t play 10 games all the way through in a week if you tried; there are not enough hours in the day.”

Knowing Lots About Things

We all know how valid these points are: the film critic who has only seen Jerry Bruckheimer films is going to have a very narrow set of experiences against which base his criticism, no matter how popular or well-made those films are. Likewise, the games writer who just loves the RTS and exults over Warcraft 3 is going to begin to falter as his range of attention broadens.

The longer games take to play, or books to read, or films to watch, the smaller our range of comparable experiences becomes. I can’t usefully review flight sims. It’s impossible. I don’t have the palette of previous experiences do so with any authority, or even much creativity. Of course I’ve played a number of the big sims, but I’m acutely aware that my capacity to be funny or observant about the genre is always hamstrung with uncertainty.

This brute fact is, for me, the crucial problem with writing about games: the vocabularies of many of the would-be writers (including my own) are brutally truncated by the very amount of time that is poured into singular exploits. When Quake is all you’ve thought about for two years, how good is your writing going to be? (In my case, it was pretty awful.)
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