Augury

Peter at Alarm-Alarm writes:

Why is no one writing good, strong cultural criticism about video games? Most video game magazine reviews are redundant and narrow-minded, rehashes of a litany of familiar technical questions about controls, graphics, difficulty, code glitches, and some mysterious factor generally referred to as “gameplay”–otherwise known as “fun.”

Full posthere.

The first thing that comes to mind is that writing cultural criticism of video games just seems boring. Maybe I’m prejudiced against the term cultural criticism to immediately think of the four interpretive paradigms of academia: racism, sexism, Marxism, and deconstructionism. To write about games in that vein, I can think of nothing more dry, boring, and unneeded. While racism, Marxism, and deconstructionism are not necessarily frequent targets of this sort of calumny, we get enough share from the feminist criticism. What we need, I think, is less of the intent to write manifestoes and more of the intent to simply write about games. What I mean by that is not writing game reviews, but also not writing for the sake of showing off your own erudition or making a cultural commentary, but simply writing for the love of a game.