Our First Great American Gamer Essay Collection
Fall 2015. Editor and journalist Zoë Jellicoe gazes out her window, only to see the rainbow of a gaming keyboard wink back at her in the reflection. A gray scrim hangs over Dublin. It gnaws at the pavement, sops bricks like unwilling sponges. Gaming necessitates a different kind of involvement to cinema or literature, Jellicoe thinks to herself, an involvement which in turn creates a strong sense of community through shared difficulties and aid given to overcome obstacles. So why is it so hard to find a physical book on the subject? In that moment, Jellicoe decides she’ll publish the first anthology of writers writing about gaming. A year later, Critical Hits: An Indie Gaming Anthology reaches its Kickstarter goal of €5,353. Launch parties are in the works. Copies ship worldwide. Jellicoe informs backers, “You’re all very wonderful, thank you thank you thank you x ~~ (╯✧∇✧)╯.”
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But this review isn’t about Critical Hits: An Indie Gaming Anthology (2016). It’s about Critical Hits (2023), edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado. It’s about the Critical Hits (2023) Machado names in her introduction as “the first of its kind, as far as I and my coeditor can tell”; the Critical Hits (2023) The Millions calls “Our first Great American Gamer Essay Collection,” and the Critical Hits (2023) Adrienne Westernfeld of Esquire describes as “the welcome ascendance of an emerging body of literature.” It’s about how Critical Hits (2023) is totally all these things, and at the same time, not.
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When it comes to Publishing™, distinctions of “first” don’t interest me. “Firsts” give colonizer vibes, tbh—or at the very least, feel like grounds for corporate litigation. What interests me is the impulse to claim something as a first and insist upon its firstness, as if the moment wouldn’t be important without the distinction.
So, what does it suggest when Machado calls Critical Hits (2023) a “first”? And what does it suggest when Graywolf publishes an anthology of writers playing video games—as opposed to gamers writing or Jellicoe’s more open-ended descriptor of “vibrant, insightful and unusual voices in independent gaming journalism and development”?
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Literature’s beef with video games, nay, technology, isn’t anything new. Wendell Berry argued against personal computers. Steinbeck preferred pencils to pens. Socrates warned fetishizing the written word would create forgetfulness, and Grog killed K’naf-gar for painting with ash instead of cow’s blood.
Though the terms are ever-changing, it’s no different that, as the intersections of video games and literature expand past YouTube arguments and trade publications like Game Informer, New York publishing houses and “serious” academics treat writing about games as an accomplice to murder, rather than an artform worth interrogating. “One can discern in mainstream game writing a common strain of anxiety,” Tony Tulathimutte writes (much more intelligentlierly than I) in “Clash Rules Everything Around Me.” “[Mainstream game writing is] quick to reassure us either of gaming’s artistic legitimacy and utility or else its corrupting effects … Most efforts to make games respectable noisily advertise their seriousness: conferences and college degrees called Serious Play and Serious Games; or the irreverent theme of Kill Screen magazine’s inaugural issue, No Fun.”
Tulathimutte is fair to draw a direct line from “anxiety” to “seriousness.” For the sake of post-nutshell clarity, assertions like literature is inherently more serious than games boil down to two anxieties, one material and one aesthetic:
1) The underfunding of the humanities. As college deans and corporate executives shred venues dedicated to reading, writing, and the instruction of reading and writing, many of literature’s practitioners can’t help but see video games as competition in an attention economy. The logic is simple, if not reductive. If someone picks up a controller, they can’t also pick up a book. (But what if that video game is driven by dialogue and subtext? Hush, hush, it’s still a “game,” semantics 101.) The issue strays from rallying against administrators (again, as they siphon a community’s resources into a handful of vacation homes) and pins the blame on personal failings—either the literaturist’s (for slacking off in a “free market”) or the future generation’s (for not respecting tradition enough to buy in). Classic crabs in a barrel. God forbid established literaturists risk their tenure by holding administrators accountable. And God forbid they hand over the reins to another generation, lest the kids experiment with an interlocutor.
And 2) ego disguised as artistic purity: holy fuck, does self-importance run rampant in the literary world. Even within a field that professes a “writer” is anyone who dedicates themselves to the act of writing, publications or not, industry-minded folks still draw lines between those with NYT bylines and those who’re just faces at readings and conferences. It amounts to this weird, industrial soup where the desire to replicate the mythos (and success) of, say, Joan Didion—a masterful albeit easier style to edit and publish—supplants innovation. In other words, the worship of celebrity writers past and present is framed as a necessary step toward the assumed goal of becoming a celebrity oneself—so much so, I feel, living writers are discouraged from experimenting until they’ve achieved widespread recognition. Throw in new mediums (re: graphic design, film, video games), which require additional artistic vocabularies, and older standards feel less relevant. Past literature, then, needs to prove it’s somehow more moral than the newcomers, so what better self-affirmation than to suggest the canon is simply purer? No wonder, in an effort to sustain writing that pushes boundaries, many younger voices leave Literature™ for neighboring industries and forms. It’s not just a matter of money. It’s also how weird-ass hybrid art, crafted in response to a weird-ass hybrid world, is treated as corrupting, blasphemous, ahistorical, and fringe.
Herein lies my biggest issue with Critical Hits.
If the marketing is to be believed, then Critical Hits is, indeed, a first. But a first in that it’s a printed collection of writers (read: vetted thinkers) writing about video games for other writers (read: vetted readers). It’s a first in that it suggests: Hey, look, here are some serious people, and they’re using video games to create something serious, so now, on this day, November twenty-first, two-thousand and twenty-three, it’s totally okay for mainstream writers to write about video games and still be considered serious!
Thing is, Critical Hits doesn’t read like that at all. From Ander Monson’s playful grappling with memory and preservation (via the forgotten Jaguar console) in “The Cocoon,” to Larissa Pham’s ironic-then-unironic adoption of gamer speak in “Status Effect” (via depression), the essays themselves play with nuance. They’re accessible and sharp. They’re innovative and welcoming. Wholly uninterested in normalizing video games through rhetoric (because, like, games are already commonplace), what’s most urgent is what can be created from imperfect tools. Fuck conclusions—here’s a record of humans mashing plastic together and creating neural pathways.
As a press I love and respect—a press that shaped much of my taste in literature and continues to give me hope for what’s to come—I wish Graywolf’s conception of Critical Hits catered less to publishing’s self-importance. Because by no means is Critical Hits groundbreaking. And that’s okay. In fact, that everydayness might be its greatest contribution to video game writing. As the latest installment in a historied genre, it presents a snapshot of publishing and gaming from the 2010s to 2023, cracking open the door a smidge more.
Best-case legacy: readers dodge the stuffy marketing. More gamers want to write. More writers want to game. Some kid picks up the anthology and goes on to tell their own story. There are novels, comics, memoirs, essays, and poems woven with threads of the SEGA-verse. Gamer-writers help create ethical guardrails for AI. Sontag rises from the grave to write “On Gaming,” and someone at Penguin Random House feels a little less guilty playing Candy Crush.