Posting this here, because I don't want to lose it. I want to expand on some of these ideas later. It is a response to this.

There are two steps I need to climb over before getting to the meat of this comment.


Step one.

There’s something of an argument (at least it seems so from the outside) within ludology that can’t decide if games should be seen as an amalgamation of prior systems (music, film, literature, interactive theater) or an entirely new one. Should we discuss them in terms of logical systems and gameplay or should we pick them apart based on more typical critical methods?


Often, critiques rely on one or the other. Sometimes they do both, but it’s often rocky and jarring. When there’s tension between the systems (like in Infinite, for example) we somehow refuse to see them as connected at all. They are always a mistake.

Step two.

Structuralism is possibly the most hated of all critical schools. It tried to take literary theory and bend it into something scientific. It tried to create a system to analyze literature. When you take this plot motion and combine it with this signifier you get this genre. When you rip something apart you pick at the parts, ignoring the whole.


Usually, words like “reductionist” follow immediately after someone tries to pull a structuralist critique out of their ass.

Unsurprisingly, it did not last long.

It was rejected. Killed. Murdered. Left to die in the halls of academia. Derrida ate its corpse.


But this post isn’t really about academics, or critical theory, or any of that. It’s about video games and the critical discussion of them – a still fresh field full of ideas. One that is incredibly active on both the highest and lowest levels of discourse. The highest – “highbrow” articles posted by respected game journalists, conferences talks and publications, and classrooms where students interact with names who are quickly growing in size. The lowest – forums, dime-a-dozen game bloggers, social media, game lobbies, and the rest of the general gamer chatter.

You’d expect both of these groups to be critically distant. You’d think that the discourse offered in one would be incredibly different from the other. But they aren’t. And that’s good. But also bad.


Because, unfortunately, both are making the same mistakes.

In the case of the lowest levels, perhaps it’s forgivable. No one is going to charge into a Sunday afternoon book club waving their hands at the patrons, screaming at them for not “getting” the subtleties of the text. No one is going to slap your hands away from The Great Gatsby for not picking up on the lack of Gatsby’s race being explicitly stated.


But at this level? At the high level?

I think we can do better.

As it stands right now the two steps presented at the beginning of this post are being glossed over, and I think that is damaging games criticism – or at least the sort that is presented here.


I can’t help but read this analysis as almost structuralist. Of course, that’s really pushing what that term means, but let me try to explain.

Essentially, throughout this post you are breaking Infinite down to separate parts, and then you’re scouring them individually for meaning. Perhaps structuralist is the wrong term – it’s almost like this piece (and game criticism as a whole) is in a state of deconstruction, except it’s deconstruction before it makes sense. It’s individually chopping up a system and then examining the bits without remembering how they were chopped up in the first place. It’s ignoring that systems can be broken and tools can be morphed if it means additional meaning can be had (see: What does “Press A to Jump.” do in the first few minutes of Portal 2? Is this really just a joke, or does it tell us something more about the implied linearity of the world we’re about to explore?).


Yes, there certainly is some worth in breaking games down like that. If anything, it’s the best place to start. We can learn a lot about a game by looking at its individual parts. Individual notes in a score can tell us a lot about its mood, after all.

The thing is, it’s also important to put it back together. It’s important to look at the piece as a whole, to listen to it thoroughly. To experience it as an experience, not a disconnected group of interactive films.


In other words, the gameplay cannot be removed from the game. It is not just an afterthought.

I’ve seen a lot of noise over the violence in the game – the shooting, the destruction, the mad dash through a world that seemingly goes from Americana to Batshit in the scope of a few minutes. Violence. Brutality. It’s everywhere. But is it not there for a reason?


Is this really a game and a narrative disconnected from each other?

Or is that feeling, that twisted turning in your gut refusing to let those two “separate” entities connect with each other — is that something to be studied? We don’t want to connect the violence on the screen to Booker. We don’t want it to connect with Elizabeth. We don’t want to believe that Daisy Fitzroy is really just a trope brought out to make us think one minute and then disappoint us in the very next scene.


Elizabeth cuts her hair. She changes. We chase a specter. We stand at the divide of a man, his own baptism before us. We watch a series of lighthouses connect to each other in the distance.

This is where the first step comes in. Why can’t these things be related? Why isn’t the dissonance between all these actions important? Can’t it tell us something?


I’m reminded of the school of critical theory that arguably changed everything – reader-response. The idea that the reader’s head is where meaning is synthesized. Not on the page, but up there, between the eyes.

When that movement came out it primarily grew from the realization that outside experiences influence individual readings of text. Video games are sort of the same way. Play experiences dictate game experiences. Your playthrough of Infinite was not mine. You mention the voxaphones – you ignored them after a while. You couldn’t get in touch with Elizabeth. You felt connected to Songbird. All of these are our opposites. When the game compiled itself in my head — when the algorithm founds its place within me – I found something else. I found a complex system of a game, a convoluted narrative that somehow wasn’t. I found a game that was talking about gaming while talking about a million other things at the same time. But none of that was due to my examination of its individual parts. It was all from taking the game in as a connected medium, one that couldn’t be examined outside of its environment.


A lot of the answers to the above questions were not answered in the game. Infinite could’ve easily left you disappointed. It really could’ve. To me, the great thing about Infinite was it didn’t explicitly tell you any of these things. It just hinted at a lot of them. It openly showed you its “flaws” hoping that you’d pick up on what was going on.

That’s incredibly risky.

But it also means that it invites discussions like this. As you say at the end of your piece, Infinite is worth praise for that alone, if nothing else.