Recently there has been a lot of discussion in the games community about criticism and objectivity. Questions have arisen such as: What is criticism, and what does it mean for the gaming sphere? What are the bounds of criticism, and what purpose does it serve? Is critique censorship? What is objectivity? Who gets to say what about games and what counts as a valid point of view?

Criticism in general is a systematic process by which we examine texts (anything is a text; everything is a text) using other texts in an effort to understand whatever there is to understand. This means that, as critics, we are making connections and drawing parallels between things that are sometimes connected and other things that are not. We are looking for symbols, cultural ties, and meaning. We are looking for some understanding, some answer or truth, even as we know that often no such neat answer exists.

Still, we interrogate. We examine. We analyze. We use a number of methods for this kind of exploration, from our personal experiences to various critical lenses. As a collective, we here at NYMG range from enthusiast critics with day jobs to tenured professors for whom this kind of work is the day job. We aren’t journalists here to report on news and developments; we aren’t reviewers examining if a game is any good for other people to buy. Sure, sometimes we report some news (editorialized); sure, sometimes we review games, but we do these things because we love games and geek culture. That doesn’t change who we are, and what we do. We are critics and scholars. And we are deeply embedded and invested in the community that we study.

Those of us branded “oversensitive,” “social justice warriors,” or both, are often told that we’re just looking for something that can be twisted into an offense, that we thrive on and perpetuate outrage culture. In a sense, this is true; we are looking for something, but it’s not an excuse to be angry (some of us don’t need one; we are like Bruce Banner in that regard, you know?). We are looking for those connections. We are looking at culture in a particular time and the artifacts produced from those cultures.

In the humanities, we talk about interpretation from different angles. We discuss authorial/creator intent; we discuss Barthes and the removal/separation of the author from the created work. We discuss whether or not an object has inherent meaning and then we strip away any meaning assigned (Saussure, Derrida, et al.); we deconstruct, dismantle, and destroy, only to build up and start again. Here at NYMG we attempt to pay homage to the notion of Intersectionality posited by Kimberlé Crenshaw as a means of looking at the ways in which distinct social/cultural/biological categories (like race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc) overlap, affect, and are affected by systemic inequalities (like racism), with the belief that we all exist at the intersections of experience and knowledge, with our various literacies, privileges, indeed, our very lives and bodies defining what we see and how we respond to things. In the case of our work, those things, those texts, are pieces of media: games, comics, sometimes television shows and films, and just as two people can play the same game and say different and divergent things about the control scheme and graphics, so can two people play the same game and say entirely different things about the treatment and development of characters, the weight of plot… and whether or not certain imagery or plot points were unsettling to that person.

As scholars and critics, we catalogue and explore as many of those factors as we can, searching for linked imagery and historical connections through comparisons, or we count bodies and appearances as an examination of representation using quantitative methodology. We listen, recounting, and signal boosting stories of those who may not otherwise be heard using ethnographic methodology. We look at race as a system and as part of larger systems using critical race theory. We look at rape and rape culture through a lens of feminist theories of various waves. We make lists and we cross-list the things that appear on them because they intersect; we create a new layer of text atop the texts we explore.

The great thing about that new layer is that it exists on its own. It is there for those who want to engage with it, or build upon it further (just as a game exists for anyone to engage, or not, or mod, or not), and yet the layer of critique does not impact the original text, which still exists. This is how scholarly critique can diverge from more activist critique, which may call for some specific action. But this is not to say that all of our critique is inactive; often the action that we call for as scholars, teachers, and critics is to merely think. To consider.

Audience Engagement and Response

Just as we, as scholars, are initiating discussions, and entering those which already exist, we are opening the door for others to step into the conversation. This last week in particular, our criticism seemed to hit a nerve; while we received a breadth of responses here on the site, elsewhere response was almost singularly negative in regard to our examination of the Cuphead trailer, first, and then as we looked more deeply at Cuphead, Fleish & Cherry in Crazy Hotel, and classic animation. We are not alone in receiving these kinds of responses to controversial work. Critics of all stripes, particularly those who work in popular culture, are routinely flooded with negative responses when presenting an argument that may not reflect mass opinion. However, many of these negative responses are knee-jerk reactions, broad statements that serve as an attempt to shut down discussion rather than open it up. And those are the types of responses that we do not engage on the site. We are open to dissenting ideas and valid critique of our work, but we don’t engage with hate speech or disrespect of any kind. Our space. Our rules.

Putting aside all the abusive, hateful comments (the slurs, the suggestions that critics kill themselves or be killed, the remarks that this thing or that is stupid), there are a few things we hear most often when others engage (negatively) with the work we do, and we answer here just as broadly:

You’re just looking for a reason to get mad – No, we are choosing to analyze and respond to a text. This is circular anyhow; how is the creator of this kind of response not guilty of the same thing when they are angered by our response to a text, a response has no bearing on their personal well-being? (Translation: nah, you’re mad.)

You’re just seeing what you want to see – Or rather, we are seeing the world in the way our knowledge, literacy, lived experience, positions, and more have colored it. You may see things differently. Can we have a reasoned discussion about that divergence?

You just don’t like video games/comic books/etc. – Why on earth would anyone spend years playing games, studying games, writing about games, and learning, in some cases, how to make games, if they didn’t like games? If anything and everything can be a text, there’s no reason to choose to study a genre of text that you don’t love, particularly since you’ll be immersed in it forever.

But you’re all white/straight/rich/women – First, this kind of statement makes a lot of assumptions – some quite easily disproved by simply looking at our own breakdown of who we are, and some that cannot be determined at a glance. As a collective here at NYMG, we are a group with very different backgrounds and experiences, and when those backgrounds inform the work we do or are otherwise relevant, we talk about them openly.

Further, we also reject the idea that some subjects are off limits to certain people because of who or what they are. We do recognize that bodies and experiences inform the ways that we think about things, and that some may be uniquely positioned to best respond to particular events, but do not accept that, for example, only people of color can ever write about race. If we are to fully interrogate a thing (any thing) we have to bring a cacophony of voices to the table.

(And as a footnote, academics in the humanities are basically never rich; rich humanities scholars are like unicorns.)

You just want to censor developers – Really? As critical game scholars we have no power over developers. Our power (like every other consumer’s) is limited to the money that we spend (or don’t) on the games that are released.

But this text isn’t racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. – Unless a text outs itself as specifically posited against a subset of people, it’s difficult to take this complex measure, and more difficult to state unequivocally that a text does or does not evoke a particular response or include particular elements. This is a matter of interpretation; critical interpretation is based on documented examples and/or connections; experiential interpretation is based on the speaker, and so on.

And this last one is particularly important, because as stated earlier, there are often no clear, strict answers to questions raised by humanities scholars and critics. Criticism and analysis is an endless conversation, with speakers moving in and out, contributing their ideas and experiences, adding new layers of thought and discussion, but often not coming to the consensus that both sides may originally seek. And that is fine. Sometimes it’s not about the destination, but the journey.