Time Sucks
Since I started writing “seriously”—that is, writing and thinking of writing as more than wasted time—video games have felt antagonistic. On the same keyboard, I could chip away at one of two dozen unfinished essays instead of inventing garden gnome-based religions in Sims 4 or Spore. My virtual Rube Goldbergs: they’re not words on a page, not some idea I can copyright, not “productivity” in the free market sense. (Few universities would brag to listservs about how I’ve discovered every species of butterfly in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.) At the very least, I ought to read a book, so I can cannibalize its language and shit out better sentences; by gaming, I’m not just foregoing the grindset of a career, I’m caving to Neolithiscism. To hedonism, to laziness, to intellectual poverty, and, God forbid, to Freud’s Id.
I’m being melodramatic, I know. But when writing about writers writing about video games (for writers, perhaps?), it’s difficult not to feel that twinge. As if art making and gaming were two competing weights on some mortal scale. After all, it’s common to say gamers play while writers write—or work, or craft, or whatever vaguely academic verbiage one prefers. But what of writers who write about games? And writers who write for games? What about YouTubers who create movie-length video essays, for free, unpacking the subtext of games with such hyperfixation an industried critic could never?
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I’ve stressed about distinctions like this more than I’d like to admit. Rather than ask “Are video games art?” again, and again, and again, I’ve found it more life-giving to reframe the question: Why do folks, particularly those with artistic sway, feel the need to disqualify games as art? What does that say about them?
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“When we call something a ‘waste of time,’” Tony Tulathimutte writes in “Clash Rules Everything Around Me,” “we usually mean something outside the narrative of whatever you’ve called your real life, some menial and unproductive activity that doesn’t amass wealth, deepen your relationships … Something that makes time pass without changing anything.”
To Tulathimutte, like many contributors in Critical Hits, the artist–gamer divide is bullshit. Calling something like gaming (but also reading and writing fiction) a “waste of time” makes us feel better about forgoing activities that don’t yield immediate tangibles. However, instead of debating video games’ legitimacy, the writers of Critical Hits grapple with how weird it is to live, and how weird it is to see that living refracted back at them through a screen, a screen millions of creatives have poured their lives into, and billions more will continue to pour their lives into over the coming decades. There’s little time for Good Morning America-style handwringing. Not brain rot, not lonerism, not Call of Duty turning kids into school shooters (though, pay no mind to the U.S. military funds funneled into each Modern Warfare installment). Here, video games equal acrylics, crockpots, car engines, and pianos. As a baseline, they’re what we make of them—not what they make of us.
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But like, what if Critical Hits gave readers one essay that refused to view video games as anything other than a waste of time? For funsies?
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Nowhere in Critical Hits is a fear of video games’ “corrupting effects” more alive than Eleanor Henderson’s “The Great Indoorsman.” And that’s saying something, considering it follows Tulathimutte’s “Clash Rules Everything Around Me”—an essay, which, since I missed it a few paragraphs earlier, debates with the concept of “wasted time” by meditating on a phone game. In the “The Great Indoorsman,” Henderson painstakingly positions herself as a non-gamer. She comes to video games as a Reader, a Writer, a Professor, and a Parent hoping to see why gaming appeals to her sons. And while Henderson sprinkles bits of empathy and half-hearted understanding throughout her essay, at its core lie tired distinctions like, “We didn’t stay inside all day when I was growing up … we took real risks, leapt from real branches.” When the essay reaches its journalistic “a-ha” moment, it’s not with a deeper sense of empathy (or even, like, a feigned interest in her sons’ interests, because quality time or something), it’s that she needs to arrive at GameStop a few hours earlier if she wants to buy a PS5 on Black Friday. “They had plenty of other gaming systems already,” she explains, “a PS4 … a Nintendo 64, a Nintendo 3DS, a Nintendo Switch, a GameCube, an Xbox One, an Oculus Quest, as well as … dozens of Atari and Nintendo systems.” (Which, like, yikes—that sentence alone is worth two thousand five-hundred dollars, not factoring in taxes, inflation, the cost of hundreds of games and DLCs, nor the unnamed “dozens of Atari and Nintendo systems.”)
What could’ve been a fruitful bridge between generations quickly bogs itself down with reassurances of its own biases: technophobia, uninterrogated classism, cliché, writerly ego, and plain ol’ disgust. I’m trying not to be cruel, but I shit you not, the essay unironically invokes participation trophies as one of its most poignant symbols. “It’s a defining tension between my kids’ generation and my own,” Henderson writes, “the idea that they are protected, unrealistically, from disappointment, from consequence … everyone gets a trophy.” How boring.
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Compared to the other “reluctant gamers” and “people who wouldn’t call themselves gamers at all”—as described by Machado in her introduction—Henderson’s approach feels flat, uninterrogated. (Ironically, in viewing gaming as unproductive and socially disconnected, it enacts a worldview that’s just that: trapped in a cul-de-sac, two decades behind the rest of Critical Hits.) Still, with the inclusion of “The Great Indoorsman,” I still feel the editors’ hands at play. For every word of my unbecoming rant, the essay serves a greater arc—albeit, at Henderson’s expense.
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It’s a strawman of a sort. Order-wise, both nat steele’s “I was a Teenage Transgender Super Soldier” and Alexander Chee’s “Ninjas and Foxes” follow “The Great Indoorsman,” undoing what’s been done. Where they conclude with resignation, like Henderson, they do so from a place of self-actualization. steele writes: “I’ll take what I found in Halo’s story … their faceless armored man. While I suffered in the closet, I am trying to build compassion for the kids who survived that closet.” Then Chee: “I’m almost an old man now, and I’m getting along fine without [video games]. More importantly, I feel like the main character in my life now … each game [is] just another mask to wear in search of truth, whatever that truth may be.”
It’s as if the editors frontloaded Critical Hits with the unabashed essays—demonstrative examples of how games shape lives—preparing to sit with the juxtaposition of Tulathimutte and Henderson, as a sort of darkest hour apropos to the Hero’s Journey. From there, the essays ask: what now that you’ve logged off? Simple: keep living. No matter how small or niche or insignificant a thing might be, the very act of caring for it, of extending it beyond its material limits, imbues significance.
What Critical Hits concludes for certain: video games aren’t as citeable (and by that, I mean copy-and-pasteable), as, say, a two-hundred-and-fifty-page memoir; they pale in comparison to the shelves of Shakespeare at your local library, the James Patterson titles flooding warehouses across the U.S.
What it leaves for you, the reader, to figure out: is it worth digging through that one Discord chat, the one you’ve kept tabs on? Dare you unearth something new about Amazing Island (2004) or House of the Dead (1996)? Are you ready to care about what’s seemingly forgotten?
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More than games or punchlines, what I thought of most when I read Critical Hits was a group of students I taught back in 2022. By the end of the Fall semester, one dissected publishing’s impulse to “[speedrun] as many [YA] tropes as possible” as it lagged behind BookTok. Another wrote a lyric essay about logic symbols and miscommunication, which, terrifyingly, flew over my head and sent me down a Wikipedia clickhole. Another kept peers from quite literally dying in their dorm rooms, while the two who sat beside them submitted bookstore-worthy designs for throwaway assignments. In more moments than I can recount, they were team leaders, grant-winners, archivists, librarians, harm reductionists, marketing specialists, and MFA-obsessed dweebs like myself. (If you haven’t already applied for a PhD in AO3 studies, you know who you are, get on it.) These students were—and still are—fucking brilliant. Hire them.
And yet, as I picked up and put down Critical Hits, I kept thinking about all the times I told these students their voice matters, that they ought to write about the weird shit they love. I told them to write, and they deflected: Nothing interesting has happened to me.
Bullshit, I told them.
No one cares, they clarified. I’m just some kid from the Midwest. I don’t want to move to New York. I don’t want to beg to be seen by universities. If I’m not already a journalist or professor, then how am I important enough for my experiences to matter? Who wants to read about me nerding out about metalcore or DnD? Why would anyone care about me playing video games?
What I want to say: shit, welcome to the club.
What I ended up saying: I do. And hey, don’t you love reading about that stuff? I know things are bleak, but what’s the harm in trying? If not for editors, then the person next to you? For all the (fellow) weirdos online who feel the same?
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As I picked up and put down Critical Hits, I kept thinking about how its essays variegated. How some blundered their way into conclusions that humbled me, how others curled neatly around my stylistic tastes without fruit. I kept thinking about what my students might contribute—and what they’d contribute ten, fifteen years from now. I thought of all the essays friends had already written about video games, and I thought about what I might offer. I kept thinking about all these things, but mostly, I thought about how if anyone just read “Clash Rules Everything Around Me,” this review would be redundant. I kept thinking about that redundancy and how, still, it amounted to something.
If my biggest quibble with Critical Hits is its relationship to self-importance (a self-importance that exists, primarily, beyond its actual content), then its success lies with what will follow. It’s joy of a new generation of gamers and writers who’ll build upon its existence. It’s the wide-open field of movements, improvements, critique, and debauchery. It’s the impulse to see something attempted. To get up. To attempt it once more.
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I want video game essays by students who have nothing to lose. I want video game essays by people who’ve never been published in paying magazines and essays by gamers who’ve been told they’ll never amount to anything, and I want video game essays by the unhoused folks at my local library who play Roblox and League of Legends and Flight Simulator every single day, people who’re vibrating in their chairs to talk about user interface. I want these video game essays to have the same marketing budget as Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, Lauren Oyler and Leslie Jamison, and I want them to receive all the reviews, the good, the bad, the mixed, any kind of review that gets people talking, so long as people are talking. I want the next Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow to be written on someone’s phone as they fuck off from working the Wamart self-checkout, and I want the next “great” video game collection to not fetishize poverty but platform it. I want my criticism of video game essays, too, to feel outdated—I think it’s productive, in the long run, that everything I write grows outdated. I want streamers to pick up book contracts and writers to start streaming, I want better language to speak about technological advancement, and I want to know why governments and companies keep trying to exploit life rather than enrich it. I want Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to feel like ancient history, for trans people to exist boorishly without death; I want Boomers and billionaires to stop hoarding wealth and for healthcare to be free, regardless of citizenship. I want essays about gaming to seem extracurricular for the same reasons I want all writing to seem extracurricular: humanity has already met its needs and now we’re pursuing side quests. And I want an explanation for why this isn’t yet possible. Where, down the line, did those I love start to feel like blood bags instead of people as they tried to earn a living? Why is it obscene to chase what could be, rather than settle for what already is?