an opinion piece by Simon Parkin wringing hands about games criticism
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/05/video-game-critic-falls-prey-self-doubt
There are things about this piece that feel they connect to that Kapka Kassabova piece about borders that I posted yesterday. There are other things about it that bother me though, too.
Particularly this: “In peacetime [Papers, Please] is a cautionary tale. This month it feels like a superfluous mirror. We already know how ugly we are.”
2 things: One, 2013 was “peacetime”? The Syrian civil war & the resultant refugee crisis in Eastern Europe was already well underway when Lucas Pope released Papers, Please. Two, the reason we “already know how ugly we are” is that art has already illuminated our flaws as well as our triumphs. A video game, by allowing players to interact & experience art more actively, has a way of making those flaws and triumphs more personal, more easy to internalize.
Just because a game makes you feel bad when you’re already feeling bad doesn’t mean it’s “superfluous”. The words I would use instead are “enduring” and “effective”.
Parkin’s column ends with a John Updike quote: “The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys.” I believe that one of those joys-- maybe the primary joy-- that a game provides is the joy of understanding something complex. The joy of learning. Understanding something awful can still be a kind of joy.
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