Super Nerd Sunday Presents: A Coda to the Coda!

Games are tricky to write about in a conventional sense. They’re first and foremost an experiential medium (that is to say, a medium wherein each exposure to the product is fundamentally unique, shaped by the inputs of the player/reader figure), but they’re an experiential medium with scads of carefully created content that you’re intended to experience as you trudge through the annals of game-space. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the people who review and write about games have to review and write about these experiences as potential encounters, a core subset of which constitute the narrative of a game.

It’s an approximation of experience, and perhaps its intersection could be in part why game reviewers are, for the most part, not taken seriously by other kinds of writers and, in many cases, their own fellows (in a weird, self-reflective way that turns on itself and seems to rabbit hole the seriousness of literary discussion surrounding games in general). There are reviewers who have eschewed this, don’t get me wrong. Ben Kuchera’s recent preview/review of Steel Battalion is a great example: he engages the reader in a genuine, frank discussion about his experience, about his response to his experience and his expectations as a player. He doesn’t hold to a conceit of neutrality, but rather admits to the distinct influence he, as a reader, had on the game. It’s short, sweet, and you come away from his writing with a sense of the game, but none of its details: it’s a great example of how you can forecast the way a game will feel, share that with other players, and not have to worry about exposing details or misrepresenting the game as something it’s not. When we recognize our own impact on these experiences, and the impact that our expectations have, we abandon concepts like neutrality (effectively an aspirational fiction in discourse, let’s be honest) and we have a frank, direct conversation about what something is.

Kuchera does this in a pretty basic way: he just lets us understand what his experience was, and how that experience is situated in Ben Kuchera as a reader. Other game journos (their term, not mine, though I like it) have done similar things. Tom Chick is famous for bringing his own experiences into his reviews, sometimes to the point where it upsets some of “his” readers. He makes no assumptions at neutrality and rather casts his writing regarding games as an experience shaped by Tom Chick the person. Sometimes it’s as simple as his discussion of a particular theme in a particular game, but sometimes he gets really deep in there: he gets into how a game relates to something bigger, something person, and generates something profound from that intersection.

That’s where the real potential of this discussion about games exists: the discussion of the moment, and the elucidation of the importance of reader response in literary experiences. Tom Chick telling us about his mother’s affectionate illustration of the importance of tolerance is every bit as important as him letting us know how he first experienced Age of Empires III, and both of these insights feed into why he dislikes Age of Empires Online, with its unfortunate balance of community and mismanaged microtransactions shrouding a system that was well executed half a decade ago. This is where great writing on games lies: in a place where we can recognize its inherent lack of neutrality, where we recognize the importance of the player in the game. Where we recognize the potency of the reader figure in video games.

Leigh Alexander is a stellar example of this practice. Leigh is so forward with the way the games impact her, so open with her emotional response to games that it’s almost heartbreaking. She’s one of the most journalistic journalists in the biz, don’t get me wrong, but when she writes, really writes, about a game’s artistic or social significance, she bears parts of herself to her audience that expose her vulnerabilities, her flaws and her process as writer, reader, and gamer.

Leigh has made Final Fantasy, one of the most venerable and interesting game series in its own right, into something far, far more by revealing her own relationship to the game and the connections that the experience allowed her to form. In doing so she marks herself as vulnerable, as “a nerd,” but, she’s unconcerned, honest and genuine with it. In her refutation of that term we can see just why: it’s the sort of marker that exposes more about the speaker than the intended audience. It showcases the insecurities of the judge, not the foolishness of the person who opens themselves up, who accepts how much they love something and discusses it honestly and openly. I know it’s somewhat ironic, given her cultural intersection with the music scene in Brooklyn (a place where genuine enthusiasm is often treated as anathema) but she’s a sort of anti-hipster in her writing. She’s an open book and, as a result, she writes about games and truly illustrates their effectiveness, their cultural import and their capacity for expression.

I guess I’m writing this in response to my previous defensive coda, because cultural ghettos are all good and well to decry, but it’s far more important to recognize the contributions of writers who attempt to force us out of these places, writers who cast games in a genuine light, that of experience, for their readers and permit their own vulnerabilities, their flaws and quirks as gamers and writers, to emerge in their writing. These are the people who push the envelope of games writing, and these are the people who are making an academic discussion of games as a meaningful literary form possible in any way.

Because we do need to generate a new language, a new hierarchy of reader and writer, to allow us to have meaningful conversations about games. More than any other medium, games rely on their readers to shape the experience, even when they don’t explicitly express this desire (as The Path does). And when we look at the author’s reliance on the reader, we come to understand games a little bit better and we see how to improve them as a medium (listen to the Portal developer commentary to understand just how important this understanding can be). When we recognize the experiential nature of games we can actually discuss them as a literary medium. When we talk about how we, as readers, impacted our own experiences with games, we’re speaking genuinely, openly and in an important and significant way. And we also begin to see how other literary mediums are driven by the reader. How readers in general reshape their texts, both consciously and unconsciously. Whether it’s in Aimee Herman’s experimental recasting of text or Yusef Komunyakaa’s play on our expectations as readers and human beings, authors play with the expectations of their audience constantly. And when we recognize this, when we understand it and embrace it rather than turning aside from it or viewing it as something separate from art itself, we see that in understanding the people we write for, we understand the reason we write. And, in this understanding, we find better writing, better literature, better art.