You Played That? Game Studies Meets Game Criticism

This position paper, presented at the DiGRA 2009 conference, examines the state of game criticism and asks what it should be as game studies and game journalism mature. Its authors, a mix of academics, freelance journalists, and industry figures, argue that game criticism has long been confined to the review culture of enthusiast press, while the academic field of game studies has largely focused on form and systems rather than the specific content of individual games. The paper draws on McLuhan's media ecology to argue that scholars have inherited a tendency to analyze media as a whole and to neglect individual works, and it calls for a criticism that treats games as meaningful cultural artifacts worthy of discussion, dissent, and interpretation.

The contributors offer several concrete arguments and observations. One author contends that fan scholarship, such as wikis, walkthroughs, and detailed mechanical analyses, already performs the kind of close attention to detail that academic humanists have yet to match, and that academic writing on games has not yet enriched reception the way comparable work in literary or film studies has. Another argues that game criticism should move beyond descriptive and consumer-oriented reviews toward asking what a game means, and that the critical vocabulary of games remains immature. A third proposes that criticism should center on the question of what makes one game better than another and develop a language of fun and play, noting that few reviews surveyed by the author discussed fun in any depth. A fourth finds that reviews already address historical context, design innovation, and artistry, and that game criticism is already present under the review umbrella.

The paper's scope is principally English-language game journalism and academic game studies circa 2009, with references to outlets such as Edge, IGN, and Kotaku. Its methodology is largely essayistic and reflective rather than empirical, though one contributor reports reviewing more than three hundred game reviews over a single year.