Previews, Reviews, Walkthroughs, and Now This
When I was seven, I wrote my first (and only) suicide note. My parents had grounded me for playing with Legos on a Sunday. I was fed up with their rules about secular toys and media. My sister, with whom I shared a room, narc-ed. Above all, my seven-year-old life wasn’t worth living because video games weren’t allowed in our house. The note, which apologetically declared I’d “storve to deth,” featured Yoshi crying over wilted flowers, a Koopa Troopa spewing football-sized tears, and Bowser Jr., vaguely melted, with speech bubbles dangling from his mouth, as if he were performing my text as eulogy. Rightfully, my parents were concerned. Now the note sits in a family scrapbook, between an interview with my childhood teddy bear and a collage of our family tree.
From an early age, I found ways to skirt my parents’ hesitancy toward video games. Later, their Mormon leanings. They wouldn’t buy my siblings and I a GameCube until I was ten. Until then, I read the instruction pamphlets that came with friends’ discs. The controls already explained through in-game tutorials, the tips and tricks already debated through friends’ Cheeto-stained lips; the lore, the stories, the flavor text. That one ominous description of Mushroom Bridge in Mario Cart: Double Dash, which cautioned against colliding with other cars, though “the car carrying all the mushrooms looks strangely inviting...” (My note makes a bit more sense now.) These pamphlets weren’t as prestigious as, say, the Captain Underpants and Goosebumps titles I checked out from the school library. But when my parents eventually found out I brought game instructionals home (I’d traded a week’s worth of chocolate milk to friends at recess), they ultimately compromised: reading was reading, and as corny as it sounded, the pamphlets produced a kind of magic, a faith, in the search for worlds within this world, not just believing in video games as games but intricate designs crafted by some great, distant, all-consuming creator.
•
At least, that sort of anecdote is how many essays begin in Graywolf’s Critical Hits, published November 2023.
•
“In my first memory of the medium,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her introduction, “I am standing behind Eric and he has black hair.” Octavia bright continues in “Staying with the Trouble”: “A ten-year-old girl sits at an overflowing desk in in the basement study of an old farmhouse.” Same with Ander Monson’s “The Cocoon”—“My first time was in a friend’s rented apartment.”
•
So many firsts (some amounting to lasts, but most middles), and yet, as much as Critical Hits professes to be a collection of writers defining the boundaries of writing and gaming, the collection’s heart—dear lord, its honest, gut-cleaving heart—is more an exploration of the essay as a genre than a ground-breaking defense of a medium. “Here is an anthology,” Machado writes in the introduction, “that holds every way in which video games are dear to me … vicarious pleasures … pains … how they reach out to us from our childhoods … connect us to other people … beg us—to interrogate our relationships to our homes … free will … our myths, which in turn become our history … metaphors for illness … depression … gender dysphoria … euphoria … grief … identities … redemption.”
•
“The thing about writing about games,” Jacob Geller notes in his video essay “The Future of Writing about Games,” “is it’s so easy, and often incentivized, to be boring. And usually, it’s practical boringness. The writing is to a point.” As far as I knew growing up, that impression held true: writing about videos games, first and foremost, was a means to an end. FAQs, git gud guides, lore dumps, stratagems, marketing materials; once I was done with a game, to hell with anything written about it. Buy another game. Go outside. Only I wasn’t satisfied with seeing these factoids as just factoids. When I read those game guides at seven, at eight, at nine, I felt like I was doing something subversive (perverted, even), gorging on forbidden, low-brow fruits. Like a parent learning from a child, their intangible worlds depended on the existence of mine.
When Geller, a beloved YouTuber and writer, brings up practical boringness, he’s specifically referring to his experience with video game trade reviews—a.k.a., elevated product descriptions. Do the controls feel good? Y/N? Is the experience worth forty bucks? Y/N? But just as quickly as he mentions capitalistic metrics, he pivots. “You know that feeling when you finish Doom Eternal, and a sweet guitar shreds over the end credits?” (I don’t.) “And you feel empty?” (Now we’re getting somewhere.) “That gnawing voice in the back of your head that says, ‘yeah, what now? What was the point of all this?’”
For Geller, great criticism is the answer. And by “great criticism,” he means writing that goes beyond box-ticking, that understands video games as experiences and not fixed products. Even if most sales reps want to measure the cost of a game against the time spent consuming it, what can never be accounted for are the hours it lives on in our memory. The dreams, the research. The strategies, fantasies, and rage-quits. The lulls and convos and fans and fanart and fanfiction. The hallucinations, the speculations; the gamification of daily tasks, like laundry and bills paid, as well the unexpected a-ha moments that jump out at you after your dog sniffs the same STOP sign for the four-hundredth walk in a row. (He’s checking his pee-mail.) Most of all: the embodied spark of a mechanic or narrative. The real-time patience required by Hollow Knight’s platforming, of which Max Delsohn writes, “I could beat the game on my own if only I stayed present and responsive to my enemy’s movements, got creative with my strategies, learned from my mistakes.”
Or Joel and Ellie’s debates about survival and sacrifice in The Last of Us, which rhyme with Elissa Washuta’s decision to pursue tubal ligation—that is, in light of the “forced sterilizations of Native American women … in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Or Master Chief’s impenetrable, anonymizing armor in Halo 4, to nat steele, a “closet”; how, in all of Halo’s superheorics, steele sees the super soldier’s self-erasure as overcompensation, an echo of her younger self: “helmeted characters … the amnesiac, dysphoric, closed-off, and guarded will always find a friend in me.”
•
In lesser words, video games aren’t made and played in a vacuum, and great criticism acknowledges this.
•
If a preview is a guess at how a game will play, and a review is a measurement of its actual gameplay, then perhaps, Critical Hits could be considered a smattering of “post-reviews.” I don’t mean anything too deep by this. I mean these are personal essays. [2] Stories, really. The written equivalent of a Twitch stream or a Let’s Play, where the existential value of a game doesn’t matter so much as the fun of fucking around and finding out. Blessed be the detours, Geller suggests, they’re “about giving to yourself.”
•
In fact, “Mule Milk” by Keith S. Wilson is one of the anthology’s best essays, and it’s hardly about Final Fantasy VI. It mulls over mules and milk and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as well as the brutality of humanmade dichotomies, re: is a rock still “natural” once it’s plastered into a wall? Re: does being biracial render Wilson a “mule”: half-monster, half-man, an unnatural technology of U.S. imperialism? Here, the lasting impact of video games unfurls in an associative logic.
Wilson is doing his dishes when the thought occurs. Do mules, the offspring of donkeys and horses, exist in the wild? Wilson isn’t just thinking about animals but his own sense of in-betweenness, a feeling of unsustainability under capitalism, as either one fixed identity or another. He recalls the FF6 character Terra, who transfixed him since he was eleven. “There are no Black people in Final Fantasy VI,” Wilson writes, though to him, Terra—an eerily pale half-human, half-monster—isn’t white, either. He recalls how a human empire killed Terra’s parents, how she was spared and enslaved not just because she wielded otherworldly magic but because she did so while resembling her captors. Her fate is that of a tool, a weapon. She enacts the violence she herself experienced. Then one day, she meets another of her kind, frozen in ice. “This is what it was: to believe you held an awareness of yourself and yet to still be startled to see, for the first time, your own reflection.”
Sometimes, to witness another in your stead, yourself elsewhere, is enough.
Later in the essay, strangers on the internet accuse Wilson of inserting race into places where it doesn’t exist. “Of course, I do,” he rebuts. “If I do not, I am not there. And that is someone else’s fantasy.” He continues, for the reader alone:
When I identify with the mule, with the monster, in part it is because I have been forced away from identifying with the man. I imbue myself in a creature and lend it my humanity so I can see my humanity, but I also identify what I am with biological difference, with racial essentialism. Or do I turn away from the game and choose not to play? Or do I play, but play not as myself, in a world that would not imagine me?
Wilson’s questions snowball, Katamari Damacy-style, thread upon thread to form a cord, their ends capped not with tidy, manufactured conclusions but celebrations of Wilson’s agency to question. To me, it makes sense. It feels sense. Wilson is a poet and game designer. Connective tissue is his trade. As an essay, and a lyrical essay at that (essayer = “to try,” I know, I know), “Mule Milk” is a living document, embodying the process of wandering through thought. My guess is people who dislike poetry will hate it. (It takes effort, I get it.) But to demand a more instructive angle from Wilson would be to ask him to betray the uncertainty he’s trying to explore.
During the final cutscene of FF6, after spending the entire thirty-five-hour game on the ground, Terra decides to fly alongside a zeppelin carrying the other protagonists. “A thing she could have done at any moment and chose not to,” Wilson notes. “That to protect herself, she hid her true nature. That this choice, too, is labor.”
•
What would Toni Morrison think of Resident Evil? Robert Frost of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle?
What are video games but hands if not mirrors? Do the controls not grip us back through the consequence of our input?
These are, perhaps, the wrong questions to ask. The singularly correct question to ask being: in the most omeletic mimesis of a video’s game’s yoke, are video games not lycanthropic—“us” but more and less us, a hyperbole of the everyday, our stubby thumbs turning to talons, our back hair carpeting into a full coat? Don’t video games allow us to reclaim danger (unable to jog at night, a gamer runs from a monster wielding a chainsaw); to travel beyond physical and financial limitations (sprawling mountains, deserts, cities, tundras, oceans all within reach of a player’s couch); to encounter fleshiness in a way most flesh can’t or shouldn’t (hording hundreds of pounds of food and ore in a fanny pack, paragliding from skyscraper-sized mushroom to skyscraper-sized mushroom, slaying bog demons that are actually just metaphysical representations of trauma)?
What, as a medium, is seemingly “just a game” sure has a hell of a way of enthralling audiences. You don’t have to move mountains to matter, though if you must, there’s always Minecraft. And perhaps, through these Minecraftian mountains, there’s the opportunity to re-envision the blocks before you as proxies—or, rather, tutorials for the boundaries of your life.
How is that any different from the most realistic of fiction?