Writer and Critic.

Co-host of Safe Room, a survival horror game club podcast, and @TIEReview, a journal of independent games criticism.


I think the difference is in effort or posture. It is easy as fuck to talk shit online. This is totally different in energy from Susan Sontag saying she had never heard of Camille Paglia in a TV interview. You used to have to actually DO something to be catty and now you can just affect unearned superiority and quote tweet. The feigned silence of being "above someone's notice" or the hard work of actually hating are pleasurable. The rest is just high school.


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in reply to @grace-machine's post:

Personally, I'm torn between wanting something to tear down the sense of decorum or polite company that pervades game criticism circles, and which mainly serves to insulate those within those circles from whatever criticism said circles might warrant; and remembering my reaction to On Videogame Reviews as making me, a fledgling writer with a merely middling reaction to BioShock Infinite, feel like a worse writer for not having already aligned with the article.

It doesn't help that even that article wasn't enough to pierce contemporary decorum. I remember professional critics of the time responding positively to it, as though Tevis Thompson wasn't describing a pervasive structural issue.

Yeah, there's a lot of games criticism culture is standing around acknowledging a problem without feeling any need to actually fix said problem. And you know, even if I knew how to engender a more openly critical arena for games crit, I do not think it would solve the problem of indifference.

It is indeed very funny that Thompson established his voice and blogdom through scolding the games crit twitterati for giving into astonishment, only to proclaim that Fortnite is the game of the generation because of its crunch-made novelty factor.

It's half an infrastructural issue, in the sense that institutions generally tend to self-select for those who are less willing to challenge them for one reason or another; and half a social issue, in the sense that it's very easy to see the stakes of a given phenomenon as beginning and ending with your narrowly defined circle of peers.

I made a "Fuck off, I don't believe in that made up nonsense" meme about this back when I was still on Twitter, but focused more on Fortnite's exploitation/erasure of black culture.

i like to think of it as Learning to Hate Good. you gotta be a Good Hater, especially since the internet makes it so easy to just be an angry video game nerd clone. that requires originality, insight, and a lot of other things that are not in video game writing right now.