the reviewer is never right: or how we're just reviewing ourselves

[highimpactsex]

i've been playing and writing about niche titles for ages now and if there's one thing for certain, it's that no one knows what the hell they're talking about with game design, aesthetic choices, and media criticism in general.

for all i care, we've been winging it since the dinosaurs died out.

vladimir nabokov has once glibly mentioned that

The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.

and while it is certainly crude and rudimentary, it is apt and very accurate about what critics really do. pierre bayard, a literary critic, would extend that on a more positive note in How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read and say that criticism -- not artistic creation -- is what makes us engage with culture directly. it is not that we need to read all the books because we will always have gaps; rather, it should be about us reflecting on our reading, our own interpretation, our own phenomenology:

When we talk about books…we are talking about our approximate recollections of books… What we preserve of the books we read—whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully—is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion…We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. … What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands.

so i think whenever i or others write criticism, it is rarely about the media itself but about ourselves, how we engage with (sub)cultures, and how we think. it is our philosophy and life history put into words to engage in a dialectical critique with some object worth studying. as italo calvino puts it in If on a Winter's Night, "The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext." if we take hermeneutical cycles seriously, then we're just analyzing the superstructural contexts we belong to. it's why i think literary criticism always (d)evolves into cultural criticism.

in other words, criticism unveils us. we are making ourselves vulnerable by analyzing how we interpret objects. it's why nabokov demeans criticism as revealing our own low iq brains.

what then is there to say about the multitude of steam reviews, youtube videos, and all those "expert" commentary on what games we should or shouldn't buy? we all know they are transparently reflections that are sometimes taken as "objective" or "community-driven" product reviews. it's easy to understand them as opinions by tastemakers/influencers which are treated as serious stuff, but i think it goes far deeper.

much of this type of "criticism" revolves around 1) how they would do things differently 2) how something is a masterpiece. even if the language tries to avoid this, ideologically The Critics Know Better. this is what the creators should've done, what they didn't need to do, why this is the way to go, why this is great game design etc. it is the idea of a Critic as Expert that makes me wary these days.

personally, i view this Follow the Dogma approach as far worse than mass media itself. adorno and horkheimer were on and on about THE CULTURE INDUSTRY and believed that popular works were popular because they appealed to the lowest common denominator -- and while that may be true to some extent, i don't think that's the right conclusion. even the "autonomous"/indie/doujin art adorno might be into is susceptible to how people generally understand criticism ("objective" reviews on works, not mediated reflections). someone could make the greatest art, but if people don't make the effort to understand it, then it will just be rejected as "outsider art" -- something that is not mainstream.

terms like "outsider art" denote how we must reify how people "do art" differently. instead of being more like adorno and appreciating the autonomy of artists who are just doing their own thing, we treat them as "different", as strangers, as aliens -- as queer.

and to a certain extent, i totally understand this. when we approach something that is totally unique, different, or autonomous, we will have to be "weirded out". it is like reading translated literature from a country you don't know; there may be a few familiar things we can grasp, but in most circumstances they are different. we want to be "in solidarity" with many people and works of art as possible, so perhaps this difference should be thinned out.

but if criticism is -- as i argue above -- actually about reviewing us, then what we're really saying is we want everything and everyone to conform to us. it's the aesthetics of being open-minded but not being that at all.

we despise actual difference. what we want is sameness, a fake universality that glosses over our particularity and autonomy for a bland formula. anything that makes us feel alienated or "weirded out" must be fucked up.

our neoliberal paradigm preaches universality but only if it's a dogmatic form of homogeneity, of sameness. autonomous art and creators with particular expressions be damned, we want everything to accord with our expectations, our own enforced "normalcy". we don't want to be "weirded out", we want to have the Same everywhere.

and on that note, it is perhaps not surprising that leftists who've not read much about queer thinking are fine with calling the rightwingers "weirdos". instead of analyzing how we grow up under capitalism and we can be susceptible to rightwing thinking, we prefer to say Those Folks are weird and unusual. we are in fact "queering" the right in order to make us more in line with the preferred convention. such moralism is only but homonationalism in disguise: we are the good gay leftists, you see -- not like those rightwingers who are repressed homosexuals who crossdress and purchase sex work.

what i then argue is to seek out things that unsettle us, that "weird" us out, and critique them in order to critique ourselves. the reviewer is never right because they don't know shit about themselves and the frameworks they hold. instead of detailing how some works are "outsider art", we should be investigating as to why we think they are "outside" us: what makes the works of, say, neurodivergent people "different" from what we conventionally think as "normal" works? what are our ableist expectations of outsider art? etc.

certainly, this means recognizing that "difference" is real in the sense it is a relationship between us and the object. there's degrees of difference in anything we do. even if i choose to engage in something that is familiar to me, i am still aware that there are particularities that i am paving over because i am part of that culture. uncovering these particularities like a good derridean scholar would show how there's a web of obscured meanings out there. and this can tie into our own worldview, our own ethics etc.

we should then learn to love being "weirded out". it tells us that there's difference, that there's much to explore, and that we still don't know shit about ourselves. loving difference is very, very difficult stuff and it's why we should do it.

speaking of difference, i've always liked sophie lewis saying we should be heterosexuals because heterosexuality isn't a thing and it can become something radical:

Heterosexualism, as an impossible demand, calls on us to extend radical love towards that which is as unlike the self as possible. If you want to be a heterosexualist, then, you must direct your love and desire towards that which is different, strange, and other. As a lived endeavour, heterosexuality has of course congealed undialectically into a static dyad-model of prescribed difference, which, ironically enough, spreads nothing so much as sameness and joylessness throughout the earth. But tiny traces of heterosexualism’s originary utopianism remain in the everyday practice of heterosexuality.

later on, she writes again,

Heterosexualists (if they exist yet) are the only ones whose praxis is capable of weaving 100% of earthly beings into the web of care. Only through heterosexualism, the active pursuit of the unappealing, with a view to bridge-building, will the earth’s horrible and unsavoury denizens be reached, touched, held accountable. In contrast, we, in the queer and trans totality (also known as “the queer and trans community”), lazily insist on organizing our lives around unmathematical principles like affinity, joy, care, solidarity, and kith.

i think the way sophie lewis queers heterosexuality is very liberating and ties into how i see seeking difference as something to be loved. it teaches us how to understand relationships and care. criticism is definitely part of this same web: we are critiquing something different in order to analyze this web of relationships we're a part of. it is a decolonial solidarity that preaches we all have different shit going on in our lives and we have our own goals, but we can still love each other and work together. we have to redefine solidarity not to be about "common goals" but to achieving our own autonomy, our own uniqueness/"weirdness".

and this means we should allow ourselves to be weirded out, to recognize difference, to never stamp out these differences for something that appeals to the mass. the culture industry that adorno and horkheimer are afraid about is actually just how we think. perhaps, it is time for reviewers/critics of the world to start thinking about autonomy and specificity, not some blanket "social justice for all" or "good works/bad works" dichotomies.

criticism is really just us negotiating with "the other" and we should try to think about this alienation/objectification and what it's saying about us.