Meta Micro-Essays

Presented are four separate thoughts on video games and games writing that I’ve had percolating in my brain for the past year. Beware: These are rough thoughts, only loosely edited. Just to get them into writing.

Alternatives to Immersion

I never know what a reviewer means when they use the word “immersion.” It’s a very common word in games writing, bordering on a cliché, and yet I don’t have a clear sense of what it means.

To immerse something is to submerge it, to surround it in totality. Using the word in the context of video games implies disconnecting the player from the real world in order to embed them in the virtual world. I never feel immersed in a game in the sense that I feel like I am actually present in the game world. Nor do I ever feel immersed in a game in a sense that I lose track of time while playing it. I always feel separate from the game, viewing it at a distance, and I like it that way. I certainly want the media and art I engage with to effect me, but I never want it to overtake my connection to the real world.

When it comes to connecting deeply with a video game, I prefer the terms immediacy and investment. I think these get at the core ideas being conveyed by the word immersion, but with greater accuracy.

Immediacy refers to the low-level feeling of playing a game. A game provokes feelings of immediacy if the player’s actions result in interesting reactions in the game. Immediacy is about a player’s ability to control what happens in a game. This could be an avatar in a platformer accurately responding to the player’s intentions as dictated by their inputs, or a destructible environment in a shooter dynamically changing during a fire fight, or simply a menu system feeling smooth and satisfying to navigate. Immediacy can even be provoked in games where the controls are intentionally slow, clumsy, or unresponsive, like in many horror games, since that can still be an interesting reaction to the player’s actions.

Investment refers to the connection a player has to the world of the game. A game can provoke investment by crafting an interesting and believable game world that the player wants to explore, or by creating engaging stories and characters that the player wants to see develop. Challenging or thought-provoking game design can motivate players to complete the game’s challenges. Giving the player interesting tasks or quests to complete can drive them to keep playing. Investment is effectively about making promises to the player. If they keep playing, the game promises to reward them by showing them more interesting things.

While immediacy is a short-term feeling, investment is relatively long-term. Immediacy is the intrinsic satisfaction of playing a game, while investment is the extrinsic satisfaction. The boundaries between these two are not strict. A game with a world that reacts to the player’s actions, like with a physics system or destructible environments, can provoke immediacy by making the player feel more in control, and investment by making the world seem more believable.

These terms, in my opinion, provide greater specificity and nuance than just immersion. A game could feel immediate, but not investing, or vice versa.

What Game Writers Actually Mean When They Write “You”

Writing in the second-person has become the default when discussing games, and I don’t like it. For example: “In Super Mario Bros., you jump on goombas and koopa troopers on the way to Bowser’s castle where you save Princess Peach.” Except, that isn’t necessarily true. Someone may be reading that sentence that has never played Super Mario Bros., or may have played it and never saved Princess Peach by reaching the end of the game, or may have spent their entire time in Super Mario Bros. never progressing past the first green pipe. Sometimes, a writer couches a statement with hypotheticals, like writing “you can jump on goombas,” but even this isn’t necessarily true. Such statements presume that everyone who might be reading the article is capable of playing the game in the same way the writer does. Differing levels of in-game skill, possibly impacted by physical or mental disabilities, could prevent a reader from being able to relate to the experience the writer is describing. Consider a hypothetical description of a color-matching puzzle game: “You can match green gems together for big bonuses, and can destroy red gems which will lower your score.” A reader with deuteranopia would likely be skeptical of their ability to do that.

This all may sound pedantic, because if someone reads enough video game writing and reviews, they will likely understand what the writer intends. Ok, so what is it that the writer really means? Here are the three things that games writers mean they write “you.”

“You” means a hypothetical player.

This is the most common case. “You” typically refers to a player as imagined by the games writer. This fictional player is usually idealized, and capable of doing anything possible within the space of the game. This fictional player is a very convenient tool for explaining and exploring the interactive possibilities of a game. As in, “You do this, or you can do that, but you must do this.” I prefer the terms “the player,” or “a player,” to avoid the aforementioned inaccuracies related to differing experiences and capabilities of anyone who may be reading.
“You” means I.

Frequently, writers use “you” when they are actually referring to their own personal experience with a game. Often times, this occurs when a writer fails to understand that the game allows for a much broader spectrum of play than they personally experienced. Returning to a Super Mario Bros. example, a writer may state, “You progress through 8 worlds in order to reach the end of the game,” without realizing that the game includes shortcuts that allow a player to skip many of those worlds. Or, a writer may interpret a procedural encounter in a game as a scripted one that occurs for all players. When playing a game, there are countless ways that one player’s experience could differ from another player’s. When unsure if an experience in a game is universal across all players, using “I” as the subject will help prevent inaccuracies and confusion.

I suspect many games writers avoid using “I” because it betrays the fact that the content of their writing is subjective. Many game fans still have a poorly conceived desire for reviews and analyses of games to appear objective. This is, of course, impossible, as to review or analyze art is to bring one’s own subjective viewpoint to a work. Using “you” instead of “I” masks the fact that the writer is forming opinions of a game based on their own inherently subjective experiences.
“You” means the player character.

Occasionally, “you” does not refer to a player, but to the player character, or avatar, being controlled within the game. A common example would be a game in which the player has full control of the player character except in dialogue scenes, where the fictional character speaks without receiving any input from the player. A writer could then, inaccurately, write something like, “You enter a dark room and speak with a mysterious man, and you demand that he tells you where your kidnapped wife is.” The player controls the character when entering the dark room, and may even initiate the conversation with the mysterious man, but the player character is the one who demands to know where their wife is. This is an important distinction to make. Simply writing “you” in all such cases obfuscates to the reader what level of control a player has in the game. This can be particularly important in complex role-playing games where the level of control a player has over the player character is not clear cut. Consider a game like Mass Effect, in which the player has a lot of influence over what their version of Commander Shepherd will do and say, but does not have total control. A writer should be very careful with their language selection to differentiate what is within a player’s control and what is not.

Is “you” ever okay to use in games writing? A second-person writing style could be fine if it is clear what is actually being communicated. A stylishly written second-person account of the writer’s personal experience of playing a game could be done well. Outside of rare instances though, I would be happy if writing on games moved on from this bad habit. Write what you mean, and mean what you write.

How To Critique Any Work of Art

The world, particularly the online sphere, is flooded with critical analyses of art. Forums, comment sections, personal blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and dozens of other popular online environments allow anyone - professional, semi-professional, or amateur - to offer their personal perspectives on a work of art. The democratization of criticism, in an age when one’s sphere of influence is less limited by access to a small number of established communication platforms, ideally encourages all people to engage with art with greater nuance. More voices, more perspectives, and more venues for dialogue should all contribute to a golden age of art understanding.

Unfortunately, I see the same missteps in criticism repeated over and over again. So, I have outlined a process that can be followed to clearly critique any work of art. The intention of this process is to promote clarity in criticism and steer the act of criticism away from assigning simplistic numerical value judgments to works of art. Criticism, especially among online amateurs but also among prominent professionals, gets lost in differentiating objective facts about the work itself, versus the subjective opinions of the critic. People will quibble about the proper lens by which to view a work; perhaps a critic was judging a work against the standards of one genre, when it is best appreciated by the standards of another. These sorts of confusions result when a critic does not give sufficient context in their analysis. The following section describes a four-step process by which any work of art can be properly analyzed. I believe all good analysis already loosely follows this process, but that process is rarely explicitly defined.

The process takes the form of a set of questions that the critic should ask themselves about the work. The questions are separated into four phases. I have provided notes for each phase that have additional context. The answers to these questions, or the result that is synthesized from those answers, is the critique. (Note: I use critique and analysis somewhat interchangeably in this writing)

This system takes two statements as axiomatic: First, all criticism conveys both the objective reality of the artwork in question and the subjective reality of the critic. Second, all criticism is valid, so long as it is properly explained and contextualized.

Phase 1: Description

What is it?
How was it made?
1. Who made it?
2. When and where was it made?

The answers to the questions in this phase are literal and objective. There may not be exact or factual answers for these questions, but they provide no room for interpretation. These questions provide context for understanding the work. The more information a critic can provide as answers, the more complete the understanding of the work will be.
There are infinite sub-questions that could detail the “what” and “how” of any given artwork. The more knowledge a critic has on these questions, the more complete their analysis will be.
Having incomplete knowledge of the “what” and “how” of an artwork does not in any way disqualify an critique. In fact, a naïve analysis can be just as, if not more, interesting than a highly knowledgeable analysis. However, a critic’s knowledge of the work’s creation and context should be clearly conveyed in the critique.

Phase 2: Interpretation

Why do I think it was made this way?
1. What do I think it was intended to accomplish?
How am I engaging with this work?
1. What do I want from it?
2. What thoughts does it provoke in me?
3. What feelings does it elicit in me?

The intention of the artist, or artists, is unknowable. Even explicit declaration of intent is not definitive, though it may provide a useful lens by which to view the work. Grappling with possible intention is a subjective consideration on the part of the critic.
A critic’s interpretation of the intention of a work (Q3) may align with their own expectations of that work (Q4), or it may not. Understanding how they align or conflict will inform the critic’s judgment in the next phase. In a simple case, the intention and engagement are in harmony, and the criteria for judgment is self-evident. In complex cases, they are in conflict, and the critic must consider multiple judgment criteria. For instance, the work fails as intended but succeeds in an unintentional way.
The sub-questions of (Q4a-c) all carry an implicit “why?”. Answering the “why” provides evidence for a critic’s argument.
There are infinite variables that affect how a critic engages with a work of art, including everything from their overall worldview to how they felt on the particular day that they encountered the work. The more a critic considers why they interpreted the work a particular way, the more complete their analysis will be. For instance, a critic saying that a work is good simply because it induced positive emotions within them is not incorrect, but it is simplistic. Understanding why they were primed to feel those emotions by the work or by other factors in their own life will provide a more complete, and often more interesting, critique.

Phase 3: Judgment

What criteria do I feel is most appropriate for judging it?
Based on evidence, how successful is it in meeting that criteria?

No single analysis can be exhaustive of a work’s meaning. All interpretations are valid. However, all interpretations tell something about both the artwork and the art critic.
An critique that focuses heavily on the critic is absolutely valid, and may be particularly interesting if the critic has a unique personal perspective that relates to the work. Conversely, an critique that focuses heavily on the work itself could illuminate details of the work’s craft and construction that encourage others to engage with the work. Both can be done well, and even done well simultaneously.

Phase 4: Reconsideration

Are there other facts about this work that could affect my analysis? Return to Description.
Are there other ways to interpret this work? Return to Interpretation.
Are there other criteria by which to judge this work? Return to Judgment.

Reconsideration invites the critic and the audience, to return to the Judgment phase, Interpretation phase, or even the Description phase. The depth of a work, and the insightfulness of a critic, could be measured by how many cycles through this process continues to yield new and interesting results. A critical analysis may never be complete, and should be left open-ended for others to consider the work for themselves. Even when a Judgment is reached, this structure always invites further engagement.

Drawn in part from Terry Barrett’s notes on art criticism and analysis

Video Games Are an Ahistorical Medium

I’m in love with the idea of being a ‘buff’ on a subject. In media criticism, I’m attracted to people who can claim thorough, even exhaustive knowledge, of a subject. I admire movie fanatics like Sean Fennessey of the podcast The Big Picture, or MovieBob of a different show also called The Big Picture, (get more original, guys) who can claim comprehensive knowledge of many directors’ filmographies or complete knowledge of a variety of film genres.

There are certainly some similar buffs operating in video game writing and analysis. Nearly every active games writer has played a substantial amount of video games in their lifetime. However, I’m frequently struck by how difficult it is to keep up with video game releases and video game history as a whole. The concept of the ever-expanding video game backlog - the games that someone has been meaning to find time to play but hasn’t yet been able to - is common not just among game enthusiasts, but regularly noted by people working in games professionally. Games writers, video makers, and podcasters that I follow often reach the end of a year without having played many of the notable and popular releases, and often note how they lack significant perspective on various video game genres or on long-running series. The time needed to play through a back log or even just play the most important games released each year is immense. This is to say nothing of the many other accessibility and preservation issues that video games face.

An average person, even an passionate hobbyist, is likely not going to be able keep up with the new releases in any medium in their free time alone. This is the role of a critic, to act as a curator for an art form. They can consume a large percentage of a medium’s history and present, and cultivate a canon of critically important works for the general public’s consideration. Yet, when even games critics can’t keep up, what happens to a medium? The result is that many video game players, hobbyists and professionals alike, lack a rich perspective on either the current state of the medium or its history. Despite being a fairly young artistic medium, video games do not have an accessible history or an established canon. I wonder, can an ahistorical medium continue to meaningfully evolve?

There are four main barriers that restrict the amount of games that even a full-time games journalist can play. First are the wildly variable time commitments that games can demand. A complete playthrough of a game can range from under an hour to well over 100 hours. Outside of crowdsourced information like the website HowLongToBeat.com - the data of which can be inaccurate, incomplete, or even nonexistent for many games - it is impossible for a player to know the length of the experience they are signing up for when beginning a game. A rough time commitment for movies, TV shows, and books can generally be easily ascertained. Even board games usually have a estimated game length on the side of the box. Yet, video games are opaque about their time requirements.

Second, games are frequently difficult to find a playable form of. The large and expanding history of games are spread across numerous game consoles and computers, so legal access to any given game requires owning the proper equipment. Re-releases and emulators help ameliorate this, but those versions frequently come with different functionality from the original releases. Graphical differences, intentional or otherwise, are common across different versions of the same game. Additionally, authentic hardware is often the only way to authentically experience certain features, like the light-sensitive cartrdige of Boktai for the GBA, or the trading and battling systems of early Pokémon games. The arcade history of games is particularly obscure, as old game cabinets often had unique hardware or control schemes that are not easy to emulate on home computers. Gaining access to older games and hardware is often very expensive, and the aging hardware itself is prone to failure. It doesn’t help that game preservation as a practice is not taken seriously by many prominent game developers or publishers. Old video game developers like Nintendo or Konami are notoriously bad at providing access to their extensive library of games on computers or the latest consoles.

Third, games can be very deep and complex systems that can provide a wide variety of experiences for players. A single playthrough of a game, even a lengthy one, may only present a small percentage of all possible experiences. Non-linear games, and open world games, and sandbox games can be approached in a huge variety of ways. Additionally, many games can have significant variations across their many releases and ports, and games can change dramatically over time with patches and added content. This can make a critic’s job very difficult, as they can often be unable to make any sort of definitive statement about a game even if they play and replay it many times. This also relates back to preservation. Games that technically still exist but have changed a lot over time in effect lose their old versions to history. Some players may have loved playing a certain release of an MMO at a certain point in time, but that version may no longer exist in any form.

The Herculean effort of comprehensive video game analysis is perhaps best illustrated by the work of the YouTuber Joseph Anderson, who as of this writing is in the process of a complete a review of the video game series The Witcher. Each of the three Witcher games has a average Main Story completion time of over 50 hours, with completionist playthroughs pushing past 150 hours on average. This is also a game with multiple endings and branching pathways. For a dedicated reviewer working full-time, a complete playthrough of one game with some replaying to see alternate playthroughs could easily take over a month, and that’s before they even start writing up their thoughts and compiling them into a video. Anderson’s project has taken over a year, with the runtime of his video series on The Witcher currently over 9 hours, and he hasn’t even put out his review on The Witcher 3 yet. If this is what comprehensive coverage of a videogame actually looks like, then the majority of reviewers are barely scratching the surface.

Fourth and finally, there are simply more games than ever before currently being published. In recent years, around 9,000 games are released on Steam annually, and the platform is host to over 30,000 games. Indie game platform Itch.io currently hosts over 100,000 games since launching in 2013. Over 3,000 games have released on just the PS4 over its brief 7 year history. It’s not surprising that even professionals struggle to keep up. Of course, the vast majority of all games are not really worth playing because they are poorly made, or unoriginal, or cheap shovelware pushed out for a quick buck. Yet the possibility of a curator discovering a diamond-in-the-rough, or a small talented developer getting a big break is drastically diminished when the medium is flooded with releases.

Some games personalities attempt to gain comprehensive knowledge of some subset of games, and their efforts illustrate the intractable difficulties of playing a lot of games. YouTuber Campster of the channel Errant Signal is working on a year by year analysis of the first-person shooter genre beginning in 1991. He is constraining his focus to a single game released in each year, with a brief rundown of other notable titles from the same year. At his pace of an entry in the series every 2-4 months, he’ll catch up to the present in 5 or 6 years. Meanwhile, Jeremy Parish of Retronauts is in the midst of an ongoing rundown of every single NES and GameBoy game ever made. He is playing all games with original cartridges as much as possible, a feat that is cost-prohibitive to most people, even professionals. Over four years into this ambitious project, he is still less than halfway through the relatively tame 678 total American NES games, and the 1047 GameBoy releases.

Videogames are somewhat unique in these difficulties. Other mediums have both shorter and more consistent time commitments than video games. Furthermore, although other mediums can also be bad at preserving their history, because they are generally not tied to specific hardware in the same way games are, they can more easily be accurately distributed to more people. Many films have been lost to time or are currently unavailable through legal means, but as long as one video file exists somewhere, it can be made available online.

Even putting aside the preservation and accessibility issues with games, comparing mediums by quantity of releases and associated time costs illustrates the unique challenges of staying on top of video game releases. Consider a reviewer for various popular mediums and their capacities for staying on top of new releases.

Take a professional video game reviewer working for 40 hours a week, or an average working year of 2,088 hours total. Let’s say that reviewer only wanted to play through all of the games that get critical attention in a given year. For convenience, let’s consider use the flawed but popular awards show The Game Awards as a basis. In 2018, The Game Awards nominated a total of 34 predominantly single-player games for awards. To do complete playthroughs of just these games would take on average 1,019 hours, with an average play time of 30 hours. That is nearly half of a working year just playing the selection of games already deemed to be the most popular games of the year. This calculation doesn’t even include popular titles that got no Game Awards nominations that year, like the Shadow of the Colossus remake, Dusk, Guacamelee 2, Iconoclasts, and many others. It also does not include any games that have a focus on their multiplayer or online component. Destiny 2, Sea of Thieves, Fortnite, No Man’s Sky, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate also got nominations in 2018, but it is difficult to even quantify the amount of time it takes to experience those games.

So, a full-time professional can dedicate roughly half of their working hours to staying abreast of the latest, most popular releases. Just playing games that are already considered to be popular is sort of missing the point of a critic. A critic ought to be playing many more games than just the most popular releases in order signal boost the interesting ones. Yet, given the release statistics I mentioned previously (over 9,000 games on Steam a year!), even a full-time professional is going to struggle to stay on top of just the cream of the annual video game crop. This is not mention the rest of video game history outside of the current year. Ideally, a critic would be making time for playing and revisiting older games as well, in order to keep them alive in the public consciousness and use them to reflect on contemporary works. If just trying to keep up is too much, history may get washed away in the flood of new games.

How does this compare to other mediums?

A full-time movie reviewer has a much easier go of it. Given a conservative average movie length of 2 hours - the actual is closer to 100 minutes - watching all 45 of the feature-length Oscar-nominated films in 2018 would take on average 90 hours. I usually end up having watched around half of the Oscar-nominated movies each year without even being intentional about it. Even as the total number of movies released in North America has doubled over the past two decades from under 400 in the early 2000s to around 800 in 2018, a movie reviewer could still see all of those movies within a normal working year. A reviewer can watch all, yes all, 800 American releases in 1,600 hours, well within an average working year of 2,088 hours. If critic is selective with what they give their time and watch just half of those films, that leaves plenty of time for a reviewer to check out foreign releases or work through movies released in the past 130 years of film history. Doing comprehensive looks at entire years or even decades of movie history is a reasonable goal for a professional. The YouTuber YMS is notable for periodically producing reviews and recommendations for entire years in movie history by watching as many of the films released in that time period as possible. The time commitment to watch the notable films of a given year that YMS has covered, like 2007 - generously, it’s around 300 movies, and realistically it’s much less - requires under 500 hours, which is a manageable goal for someone working full-time on that project. Joseph Anderson surely spent at least that much time just playing through the Witcher games.

Novels are a much older medium than videogames, but the comparative speed at which a person can work through novels allows for a single person to stay on top of new publications and catch up on a lot of history fairly quickly. An average reader reads 150 words per minute, or roughly 100 pages in around 2.75 hours. A quick reader, like a professional book reviewer, can comfortably push their words per minute up to 200, or 300, or even 400 and cut that time down to 2 hours or less. For a full-time book reviewer working 40 hours a week, this means they can comfortably read through 4 or more novel-length books - 50k to 100k words, or 200 to 400 pages - per week, and still have half of their week to write reviews without their work infringing on their personal time. However, the quantity of books published each year is staggering; UNESCO estimates that around 300,000 books are published via traditional publishing houses each year in the United States, although a lot of those are not new novels but reprints, or new versions of older works, or even non-novel books like textbooks and cookbooks. Still, presuming there are tens of thousands of novels released a year, if a reviewer were to narrow their focus to a category or subgenre - say, young adult fiction or hard sci-fi - keeping abreast of that focus’s history and contemporary landscape by reading over 150 books in that category per year is actually quite manageable. Or, for example, the New York Times Bestsellers List usually caps out at around 35 to 40 each year, a doable reading list for a professional, or even an enthusiastic hobbyist. That translates to under 250 hours of reading time. One could do that, or do complete playthroughs of two of the Witcher games.

Scripted television is probably the closest equivalent to videogames in terms of time commitment. As with video games, TV shows can vary hugely in length. In recent years, the 8 to 10 episode limited series with 44 minute episodes has become a common standard in recent years, which will take a viewer less than 8 hours. On the longer end though, a full watch-through of a multi-season prestige television show will require another order of magnitude. Breaking Bad will take you 62 hours, all of LOST will run you around 120 hours, and a binge of the entirety of Supernatural will take you over 300 hours. And television is producing more content than ever as the streaming wars rage on. A decade ago, there were around 200 new seasons of scripted television released in the United States a year. In 2019, there were over 500. That’s a daunting challenge for any hobbyist or professional looking stay on top of the state of television, especially when the content is divided up across several dozen channels and streaming services. Given an average season length of 9 hours - 12 x 45min episodes, or 24 x 22min episodes, with outliers both less and more than that length - that translates to over 4,500 hours of American television each year, more than double an average working year. Still, compared to the time commitment of even just sampling all 9,000 games released yearly on Steam, this is more reasonable. As with books, confining one’s focus to a subgenre or category of TV makes the task very manageable. Again using an average season length of 9 hours, one could, for example, watch the top 50 highest rated TV seasons of the year in around 450 hours. It helps that TV is a short-form and passive medium, allowing one to progress through a series via quick installments during downtime. Last summer I watched the first three seasons of Community - around 26 hours - in less than two months just by putting the show on periodically during meals or while cooking.

Still considering TV, if you are an anime fan (read: giant weeb), you can reasonably keep up with a very high percentage of new shows each year. Anime is released seasonally, with each of the four seasons in a year bringing around 50-60 new seasons of TV each. Sampling the pilot episode of each season, given an episode length of 22 minutes, is around an 80 hour commitment over the course of the year. For some time, the anime YouTuber Digi-nee did exactly this, sampling every new anime season, gradually narrowing down a weekly watch list to around 4-6 shows a week by the midpoint of the season. Even if Digi opted to watch all anime TV produced in a year, presuming an even mix of 12 or 13 episode seasons and 25 or 26 episode seasons, that translates to under 1,600 hours of anime a year, a tall order but certainly possible. If you focus that down to a quarter or even just half, that allows for plenty of time to watch anime movies and catch up on older works as well.

All of this numerical analysis is simply to convey that despite producing more new works per year than most other mediums, aside from novels, games require a much larger time commitment than other mediums. Factoring in the additional concerns regarding the preservation and accessibility of games, the result if that the vast landscape of videogames and its history in unknown to people, even the most passionate fans.

This is not necessarily a dire issue that needs addressing, though I would like to preservation efforts improved, and older games made more accessible. All this does mean that much of video game history will be, and already has been, lost and forgotten in time. And there can never really be true video game buffs in the same way that there can be for film or anime. At best, a video game buff will closer to a novel buff, someone who either samples a few different important works from a large variety of genres, or who hyper-focuses on a specific category. Even then, the number of new experiences a book fanatic can have will likely be drastically more than a video game enthusiast.

Video games are an ahistorical medium.

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