Plus Ca Change...Again...

For those few in the world that trouble themselves over such things Chuck Klosterman's article in Esquire about the lack of figurehead/arbiter/whatever you want to call them critics in the world of video games that can match the power of, say, a Pauline Kael in film, has caused quite a ruckus! Henry Jenkins, ye olde tyme champion of video gamery has posted the inevitable, and frankly deserved, eviseration, although I think comparing it to Roger Ebert's (it should be) infamous declaration that video games are inherently non-art was a bit harsh, and frankly misleading. If you've had a chance to peruse both the count and the pointer-count, you may have noticed that Klosterman doesn't really say that video games somehow can't be art or that video game criticism is impossible, merely that it is non-existant (and there, as Jenkins proves, he is quite wrong). Consider:

Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation—he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future....

Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequence of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as it does with the art form. However, I can't see how such an evolution could happen, mostly because there's no one to develop into these "potentiality critics." Video-game criticism can't evolve because video-game criticism can't get started.

Not exactly a statement that supports Jenkins' description of the article as "to theories of art that have been dismissed and abandoned elsewhere in criticism," but rather a frank admission that we do not, as of yet, have accepted terms or criteria by which to create video game criticism (or at least the soft of mid-level criticism that exists somewhere between academia and "user's guide" criticism...the level where Kaels and Eberts dwell). Also, he touches on, although he doesn't discuss, a much deeper issue: does an interactive artform really require what one might call the modernist conception of the critic as ultimate reader and meaning un-coverer? Is the new medium creating a new critical culture by proving the former elitist hierarchy inadequate to the task of describing it? Has the revolution come!?! Will it be televised!?! Will there be a VS mode!?!

If so, it's hard to ignore the similarities to the emergence of previous critical regimes. After all, the earliest film criticism was internal industrial summaries of film products, what we might now call plot summaries, intended to help distributors and exhibitors chose and market their product ("users' guides" in any sense you chose to take it). Then, looking back to the earliest forms of academic/elite critical discourse to the Soviet Avant-Garde and even going as far forward as Andre Bazin we see an attempt to determine a) is film art, or merely entertainment, or perhaps even a social problem and/or tool? b) if it is art, how does it relate to other arts, what makes it unique and what makes it similar to existing forms of art and artistic discourses? c) if it is art, by what standards do we judge it, how do we describe it, how do we interpret it? d) and yes, of course, it's going to totally change the whole fucking world.

Sound familiar? My concern is, as video game criticism develops, that it become, as film criticism did before it, so wrapped up in trying to figure out what the hell video games are and what essential properties (usually dependent on whether the medium in question is the savior or the satan) they exhibit that it ignores the world that creates and uses video games. It would be nice to believe that we can learn from the mistakes of critics past, or at least that this is a sort of necessary phase in the development of a new critical enterprise that we can, with the aid of hindsight, dispense with all the sooner...but plus ca change...