Even When You’re Not Playing, You’re Playing: On “Critical Hits”

Written By Mason Andrew Hamberlin

J. Robert Lennon & Carmen Maria Machado, Eds. | Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games | Graywolf Press | November 2023 | 224 Pages

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Illustrations by Mason Hamberlin.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: A Corny Tutorial

If you’ve managed to read this far: achievement unlocked! I know there are emails in your inbox, dishes to be done, appointments to schedule, friends to text because you haven’t texted them in weeks. Or, perhaps, you’re wondering how to stomach The Depths in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, or why you want to spend the five-to-nine after your nine-to-five paying rent to a racoon in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In this attention economy, it all cries out, itches a corner of your mind. But here we are, for maybe a moment longer, staring at some echo of the same screen.

I’d like to believe reading is a conversation between writer and audience. However mimetic, idiosyncratic, facsimilistic, pastiche-istic, masochistic, synesthetic, yadda, yadda, it’s a miracle, a privilege even, that humans can mangle each other’s inner worlds through these very letter-symbol-thingies we call words; that, however many quarters we cram into this vending machine called “reading,” it dispenses something into our brains.

So, yeah. Pause at any time. Bookmark your place with receipt paper or spit. Step away, refresh the page, return to a previous section. I don’t know if you can save scum here but take a crack at that. Or: simply move on if you prefer. 

You already have your sword, I suppose. And you’re not alone, nor is your time already spent. [1] This living thing is (allegedly) an open world adventure.

(Also, sorry, not sorry: the video game verbiage only gets worse from here.)

 

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.

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At least, that sort of anecdote is how many essays begin in Graywolf’s Critical Hits, published November 2023.

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“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.”

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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.”  

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“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.”

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In lesser words, video games aren’t made and played in a vacuum, and great criticism acknowledges this. 

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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.” 

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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.”

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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?

 

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.

 

Additional Reading: Expository Cutscene Where the Narrator Infodumps Out of Hyperfixation

 

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?

(easter eggs)

 
Mason Andrew Hamberlin

Mason Andrew Hamberlin (they/them) is a writer, designer, educator, and cursed earring-maker from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They’re currently at work on an essay collection about amateurism and trans embodiment, as told through gyms, butt rock, Bionicles, and Home Depot. Other writing can be found in Ninth Letter, Cleveland Review of Books, The Rumpus, Entropy, Adroit, Shenandoah, and more. In the meantime, you can find their doodles @there.must.be.four.panels on insta or @mason_hamberlin on Twitter. Say hi online!

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Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein