It is a truism in video game circles of serious thinkers that video games are a young medium and that we are forging new territory with our criticism. That is of course bullshit in both respects.
Video game critics are often cut off from other mediums. May perhaps that our medium is so new that more energy is required to get anything done as each new step is not just walking along a singular path among the fold, but having to stir and pour the concrete before a step may be taken. So much time gets spent toiling away on our own medium that we rarely look up and see the critical spheres of other mediums happening around us and the realization that so much that is considered with art is true for however an artist wishes to express themselves because it is all still human expression.
Non Play Criticism is my attempt to occasionally highlight some piece of criticism relating to another medium, educate whatever readership I may have by pointed it out and try and bring back into the fold whatever lesson it may have to offer.
If nothing else, I share an interesting piece of criticism from another medium.
Sorry for the two-week hiatus. Desert Bus. This week: Comic Books.
Comic book criticism is not easy to come across. It suffers from a lot of the same things video game criticism does. I’m sure it exists. In fact, I pretty much know it does, it’s just I don’t know where to look or how to start. The mantra f any outsider to video game criticism. It’s why I’m very particular about Critical-Distance’s Google ranking in certain keyword searches.
But during one of my recent attempts to find something worth reading, I came across this little piece by David Sweeney at the Conversation.
Read it before you continue on.
I pay attention to changes that occur over long periods of time, marking waypoints along the way. I remember not too many years ago when both comic publishers and enthusiasts alike in a grasp for respectability tried rebranding their reading material as “graphic novels.” Mostly this had to do with the rise of trade paperbacks now just called trades to differentiate them from singles. That rebranding didn’t work out so well and now they’re just known as comic books. I know I stopped caring about the terminology.
Now video games aren’t trying to rebrand themselves,1 but still many of the same hardships of cultural stagnation taint both mediums. Comic books and video games are not so much brothers-in-arms so much as two walking the same path.
As noted in the article, TV has received its academic and artistic recognition; the novel was pushed against and received its due; and arguably comic books are coming into their own in the wider culture at last after so many setbacks. In this time of lazing around and taking these a bit easy before the December rush, I’d like to note as a medium we are not alone. No greater significance, no grander point this time around. Our struggle is not new or even solitary.
Though David’s right. Don’t bow to the establishment of other mediums. They did it their way, we do it ours.
- Interactive fiction, as far as I’ve seen, is an attempt at being recognized as a genre and legitimate variant of doing video games. ↩︎