negative tendency

I feel a little at odds with myself around videogames these days.

When I started in the late 00s it was mostly taken for granted that videogames sucked. The famous beige shooters of the time (so unlike the vibrant neon shooters of today) were the most obvious outwards sign of how the whole format seemed to have stalled, alongside licensed platformers, increasingly rote and charmless rpgs, etc.

To me this negativity was both useful and aggravating - it was useful in that it acted as a spur to do things differently, and to search out and celebrate those works that seemed to anticipate all the weirder possibilities that were still being left on the table (Killer7, Ico, etc). But it was also undeniably chauvinistic: so much work was dismissed solely on the basis of a recieved impression, or distant genre stereotype. The focus on what videogames would be seemed to turn into an ahistorical license to ignore whatever it was they actually were; I remember being puzzled that so few of the people calling to reinvent videogames seemed to have any curiosity about the format as it had already developed, all the weird byways it had already gone down. It was fun to explore some of those byroads - pirate carts, Seaman, Mel Croucher, microcomputer games with odd changes in framing perspective or tone - all the interesting things that seemed to be left out by the narrowing contours of a newly codified sense of what videogames were, or should be.

I think at least some of that insularity has been worn down in 2025. It's not a novelty to see serious and respectful criticism around previously dismissed genres (the visual novel, the dating sim), or people highlighting interesting touches in games that would have previously been treated like chum for some variety of angry videogame nerd. If anything seems beyond the pale now it's negativity itself, the implicit violence in all generalizations - when you say videogames suck, which videogames are you talking about? Have you played them all? Why are they bad? According to who - to you?

And when I say I feel a little at odds with myself, it's because as much as I'd like to see this change as welcome... in the same way as I can't help but group together the chauvinism of mid-aughts gamechat with the ignorant masters-of-the-universe posturing of the newly emerging tech castes of that era, or the empire building fantasies of people who seemed to see the whole world as a blank slate for the imperial imagination... in the same way, I can't totally disconnect this change in emphasis from the context from which I saw it emerge: a context that to me is one of protracted political failure. The Restoration, the brief shake-up and eventual further entrenchment of established powers - the slow removal of other possibilities. Not so much capitalist realism as capitalist stoicism, the sense that things stay the same and what changes is how we respond to them - a corresponding turn towards spirituality, self-help, various forms of hustle. It's not so much that I think efforts to discover new and interesting facets to Fester's Quest (Sunsoft, 1989) are part of some deflating retrogressive project. It's more like, I can't help but feel a little less excited by that stuff when it ends up dumped on Substack next to similarly open-minded and reclaimative arguments for the unsuspected virtues of, say, the Catholic Church. If it means something to argue for greater subtlety and attentiveness when something seems at risk of being swept away, then what does it mean to keep doing it when nothing seems capable of being swept away anymore, however rancid it may be?

It also depends exactly where that subtlety is applied. I could live with a universe of Fester's Quest Revisionism, but part of the aforementioned decade plus of political failure has been a victory lap of monopoly capital - the inalienable right of anyone with enough money to decide what the rest of us have to change our lives around. There's a form of culture this produces, but also forms of cultural reception that sit downstream. The person wiped from long hours or a second job who finds themselves sinking into the same game every night. The dispersed friend group who play the same bland MMO as a way to catch up. Virtual gambling as symbolic relief to the seriously precarious. The streamer pulled into the wake of whatever game is able to most reliably promise a stream of new content. The game critic who has to find a way of writing about the only five games you can make money writing about.

And stricture becomes sensibility. The last ten years of videogames criticism have been focused on identifying and appreciating craft - and as noble as that is as an aim, to me it's tainted by the fact that if your living depends on being able to write about eg Grand Theft Auto then you better appreciate the craft because there's nothing else fucking there. The beautiful statement by Pliny, that no book was so bad that no good might be gotten out of it, starts to curdle a little bit when it becomes justification for locking someone in a basement with 5000 Hardy Boys novels.

I'm wary about too-consolatory sophistication - the elevated philosophy of the middle ages peasant who declaims that all worldly things are vanity, as they perish age 22 from drinking water contaminated with human shit. It's not even that this makes what they say untrue, exactly - it's more like, I'd credit it more if I felt like other possibilities were still on the table.... I can't help but wonder if our new flexibility of viewpoint around videogames reflects a sense that the things themselves are no longer at any risk of changing. Discursively there's more room to breathe than ever, infinite subtlety, metadiscourse spawning from metadiscourses... every possible point of view around the newest Rainbow Six game, precisely because the prospect of "newest Rainbow Six game" now is such firm footing, more immutable than stone, a safer assumption than that of our lives, our odd and wormy desires...

And maybe if you like Rainbow Six that isn't so bad. I think what ultimately makes me feel a little at odds with the culture around these things is a sense that everyone likes videogames, now - - or at least everyone still inside the format, everyone who makes these things or plays them or talks about them. Liking videogames is now the entry ticket - it's not so much that we've resolved whatever tensions we might have with the format as that they've been pushed outwards, into a boundary around the thing itself. You Must Be X Unequivocal About Videogames To Ride, and if you're not, maybe this just isn't the place for you. Gamers only - well and good, part of the fabled maturation of the form, why not leave videogames to the people who like them? But it means I have to think about where I stand, as someone who mostly likes videogames when it seems like they might be becoming something else.