Solving the Critical Review Problem

For a while now in the videogames industry, we have been faced with the problem of establishing the discipline of videogame criticism, as opposed to videogame journalism.  Videogame journalism is abundant, and has been for a very long time.  From the original Electronic Games Magazine of decades ago to the explosion of internet games journalism sites, there is certainly no lack of product review and industry news available today.  The problem is, as longtime game designer, critic and theorist Greg Costikyan said in his article "Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It"  that the videogame industry needs serious criticism of videogames the same way that film, literature and music have serious criticism.

Legitimate videogame criticism does exist, and did before Costikyan's article.  Costikyan himself had already done serious criticism before he wrote this piece, and much of his work is influenced by the godfather of videogame criticism, Chris Crawford.  There are critic-craftsmen like Dan Cook, Ian Schreiber and Brenda Braithwaite.  There is also a lot of good humanities-style criticism blogs from people like Michael Abbot and Eric Swain; and there are even amazing criticism aggregation sites like Critical Distance.

So how could Costikyan say that we need videogames criticism, and we don't have it?  Costikyan cites Pauline Kael, a famous film critic, whose reviews of films were legitimate pieces of criticism that could be applied to the craft of film-making at large. Costikyan wants there to be a game critic with that kind of penetration into the field of game-making. Unfortunately, this isn't yet the case with games, and perhaps it is because games are different.

I think that we have to understand why videogame criticism is unlike film, music, or literary criticism.  The spectrum of videogames is much broader than the spectrum of films.  That is to say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is far more different from Farmville than any two films could be different from one another.  Except at the most basic level, Portal and World of Warcraft have nothing in common.  You play both of them, they both have goals , and death is not permanent in either; that's about all the ground they share, unless you want to talk about hardware.  So, what is the solution promised in the title of this essay?

Videogames are an incredibly diverse field, but they borrow things from one another.  Game mechanics appearing first in a role playing game later show up in a shooter; puzzles show up in a platformer, etc.  There needs to be one place where all of these ideas can come together, and the source of those ideas needs to be critical reviews so that we always base our theory on real games.  Thus, we have the reviews on the Game Design Forum; a standard way to critically examine videogames.  Each review will dissect a game and yield an analysis of the essential game design concepts in that game.  Those concepts will be immortalized in the game design dictionary.  The dictionary will then serve as a complete archive of as many game design ideas.  Since finding the discourse on any particular game design idea can be difficult, the dictionary can act as a hub to refer to the reviews and essays that reference it.

The other important part of the Game Design Forum review is that anyone can write one, as long as it's good criticism.  At the Forum, we recognize that games are about fun; you don't have to be a working designer to say something meaningful about fun.  If you do have insight into what makes a game fun, we definitely want to hear it.