The fantasy of sitting on a jeweled throne is one of complacency. To be cared for in all avenues of life, while still being able to give out an edict to the general public (that’s most of us) that everybody still has to listen to. While no man is king, there are certainly those that act like it.

Or at the very least – there are people who do have their every need met, and still feel the need to bother the rest of us.

Most of these people are Academic Critics. A phrase that implies that everyone is supposed to listen when they talk. I just made that phrase up, but I felt a deep shiver when I typed it that it’s going to be the headline of an Atlantic piece sometime soon. Sometimes these people are also Game Developers, but not the kind that makes things for the rest of us. It may be a little easier to compare them to the kind of half-brained cartoonists that send in things to The New Yorker.

They’re largely disconnected from the actual state of Videogame Criticism. After all, it would be difficult to keep your ear so close to the ground when you can afford to have a head in the clouds.

Videogame Criticism, like a lot of cultural criticism is always a matter of class. People that get to write whatever they want three times a year and get both money and immediate access to a large audience are different. Different from the dozens of critics that spend cash they don’t have just to take part in a conversation. So estranged are these people from the marginalized writers I know, that they’re expensive hot takes are always controversial.

Never are these articles meant to be digested and forgotten about. Together with a certain attitude of haughtiness, these articles come with a deep-set sense of contrarianism. To afford contrarianism for the sake of it is a sign that the person talking to you doesn’t need to be invested in the culture they’re critiquing. Even if they make things for that culture, they will never represent the attitudes or perspectives in that same culture.

Once every few years, these are the people that have the ability to massively hold back the state of games writing. Hot Takes that only really register as lukewarm but don’t need to defend or be beholden to actual positions that get us all talking about the same things we were two years ago. Performing any kind of analysis isn’t a race, but if it were one this would be like making us all run through waist deep mud. How can we truly get anywhere when so much of what people are writing about is always going to circle back to These People?

I know creators in this space that suffer every day. Some of them are homeless, or the opportunities they have are ones they carve out every week. You see them as guest contributors or on small websites like this one. Creators that I know doing excellent work in the hope that their experiences might matter to us, that they might have a voice. It feels – and it always feels cheap to concede so much of our culture and so much of these spaces to people that have an Atlantic column.

I wonder what the writers I know could do with having instant access to such a wide audience. What would the conversation about videogames be like? Would we all afford the same positions just to get people talking about what we think? To cause controversy and discussion is not necessarily the same as moving understanding of art forward. To think that, you’d never have to worry about your words really keeping a roof over your head.

We allow people that clearly need to Get New Hobbies control a lot of the discussion about videogames. Never is it from a genuine place of sinister desire, but often it simply comes from one of having that guaranteed audience. People who know they can say whatever they want, because it will always be listened to. Some of these people might even get to be what the general public thinks of when the term “Game Developer” is used – even if that term hasn’t applied to them in a decade.
The crown is not a literal jeweled one, but it often comes in the shape of being recognized and having certain positions of authority. The rest of us push the mill every day of our lives, and who’s listening when we get spoken over so often?