Not to put words in your mouth (or your, er, fingers?), but I think what you’re getting at is the need for games criticism to begin evaluating games as a unique media, using the standards its set for itself. As you say, games communicate primarily using interactivity as their language, and they are the only media to do this. We need to develop new language that accounts for this characteristic.

I think the tendency to break games into little pieces and evaluate each seperately probably comes from the industry’s origins in the tech sector. But they aren’t just gadgetry anymore, and assigning arbitrary numbers to each “component” without discussing how they fit together as a whole is no longer acceptable.

First, obviously, the Bioshock 2 reviewer has not explained him(or her)self properly. We (a school) teach kids; opinion, reasons, examples. Give me your opinion, and two reasons why you hold that opinion, and examples to illustrate each reason. Opinions like “it has good gameplay” are fine if they’re developed with reasons and examples, if they’re not then it’s a poor argument; you’ve given no basis for the view you hold.

Second, slightly bizarrely, you seem to be arguing that “game-ness” is whatever films and books are not (correct me if I’m wrong). That’s like saying acting is not part of “film-ness” since you get acting in the theatre. This is clearly nonsense. You wouldn’t say that “football-ness” is not running, balls, rules, players, tackles, tactics etc because they’re all in other sports. A thing is allowed to be the sum of its parts, it doesn’t have to be reduced to its unique attributes.

I’m not quite sure how you see these two arguments coming together, since one argument asks for better criticism, while the other expresses disappointment that critics apply knowledge from other fields of criticism.

If you want better criticism you have a whole range of critical theory from other art forms to help point out the flaws in, for example, the narrative, acting, architecture or even the cutscenes. Throwing away those critical tools because they’re used for other media (books, films) feels like an over-reaction.

A simple reaction to poor criticism of the “gameplay” element is to ask for a more developed argument, more reasons and examples. Denying that games can and should be criticised for the parts of them that resemble film and books is to rob the critic of a whole raft of tools and understanding that they can apply to the assessment of games.

I don’t think games all need a story or to aspire to be literature, but i don’t think all games need to be game-ish either. Some games don’t really need gameplay, some do.
Limiting interactive entertainment to being just Games seems just as limiting as making them only literature.

Subjective over Objective?

Ebert over Siskel?

That’s fine by me. Fantastic, even. I judge games by what I feel. That feeling is… I ‘spose, compounded by their design choices, but if it’s fun but clunky I’ll still love it.

I agree that language like that in the quotation at the beginning of your essay is pretty repellent; sentences like “This game shows that games can be literature” make me cringe. But not for the same reasons as you, perhaps. It’s because it’s cliché, it’s vapid.

But I don’t agree with you on games as literature in general. You seem to me to claim that games should *not* be literature—all of them, at all. I get that you want to play games for their gameness. More power to you. But when you say that games *should not* focus on being literature, but rather as games, you invalidate the literary merit of every game. *Why* is “being a game” better than “being literature”? It’s not, and the same vice versa.

Personally, I play games for fun and for any literary value I can get. I don’t like it way people say that something is the one right way, or that games *should* focus on one thing or another.

What’s wrong with diversity? If every game developer in the world focused on games as “literature” to the detriment of games as “games”, then some people should rebel . But if different people focus on different things, then I call that good.

(But if I’m misunderstanding you, of course, please clarify for me what you think. :) )

But in short: no one is doing the big picture of “escapist technologies”. Instead they’re coming at this stuff with a vocabulary derived from film, or from lit crit. We need to understand all that stuff comes under a bigger picture of something like “imaginative escapism”.

Games are probably older than literature, after all. It’s just that they got their Gutenberg press/mass democratization at a different period in history.