The comedian Dara Ó Briain has a funny routine about video games. He talks about how no other form of entertainment purposefully withholds content until it considers that you deserve to see it. There are no books that test you at the end of the chapter to ensure you have appreciated all the themes correctly; films don’t end if you fail to spot a visual gag. But this is how most games work. If you’re no good, it’s all over.
Which makes reviewing a game a very different experience to reviewing a movie or a book. Peter Bradshaw doesn’t need physical dexterity or pinpoint hand-eye coordination in order to see the ending of Transformers: The Last Knight, but if a critic wants to write about the closing moments of, say, Rise of the Tomb Raider, you have to earn that opportunity – and it may take 30 hours to get there. This is only one way in which writing about video games for a living is pretty weird.
As the Guardian’s video games editor, I am perhaps the only journalist who does this role for the quality press as a full-time occupation. Maybe in the world. While much of the news media still see games as something for teenage boys – despite games being a $100bn (£76bn) a-year industry, bigger than Hollywood box-office and the global music industry put together – the Guardian has been writing about them as a cultural medium for more than 20 years.
We publish reviews, analyse the industry, consider trends and controversies – in other words, we treat games in the same way as films and music, covering everything from the smallest indie release to the biggest blockbuster. Traditionally, video game reviews were published by specialist magazines and aimed at a very specific demographic of enthusiast players – mostly male, mostly in the 14-25 age category. Games were evaluated like consumer products, with painstaking attention given to elements such as graphics and sound as well as more ethereal concepts such as “playability” and “design”.
Over the last decade however, the games, and the people who make, play or offer criticism of them, have all matured and diversified. Most modern surveys show the audience for games has an almost even gender split, and the average age of a player is around 35. Many people who grew up playing on the ZX Spectrum and Sega Mega Drive in the 1980s and 1990s just never stopped, while mobile phones have introduced games to an audience who may never have considered buying a console or a computer. We’re now writing for a vast range of people.
But it’s not the readers that have changed. Games criticism has shifted too. At the Guardian, we analyse games as an artform rather than a product. Our reviewers are seeking to examine and convey the experience of playing, the feel of the world, the pull of the narrative, the emotional connection with characters, or the intelligence of the mechanics – and crucially how these are achieved – rather than providing a clear guide on whether or not you should buy a consumer item.
This may seem strange, even pretentious, to people who haven’t played or thought about video games in years. But games have matured into an expressive, meaningful and diverse cultural phenomenon. There are still games about racing cars and shooting stuff, but there are also games about the terrors of immigration (Papers Please), the pain and pleasure of teenage friendship (Life is Strange), the meaning of artificial intelligence (Nier: Automata) and the experience of grief (That Dragon Cancer).
Although battling through an entire game was essential for reviewers in the past, it’s now often not possible to “finish” a game before writing about it because, the whole concept of completion is outdated. Modern action adventure titles such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed and Witcher take place in vast open environments filled with side quests, mini-games and other hidden treats that may take days or even weeks to discover.
Sophisticated video game worlds also house their own hidden mythologies and conspiracies, which it can be difficult for critics to anticipate. For several years an active community of players has been combing the landscape of Grand Theft Auto V – an ostensibly straightforward modern-day crime game – convinced that there is an alien crash site somewhere on the map.
The last five years have also seen the emergence of games designed to be played, not just for a few days, but for years. Massively multiplayer adventures such as World of Warcraft, and online shooters such as Destiny and Tom Clancy’s The Division, are regularly updated with new quests, items and locations, and usually go through intense periods of change as communities develop and start playing the games in ways their makers didn’t expect. These raise new questions: how does a critic capture the nuances of a new game when the experience is likely to evolve over many weeks? What are you trying to assess?
Some writers seek to convey their own experience within the game, providing a snapshot of the world, which is where games criticism intersects with travel writing. In a lot of ways, modern games are more like destinations than entertainment products; they are places to visit and live in. So it makes sense to review them as tourist experiences, featuring a few of the sights and sounds (the bustling markets of Uncharted 4’s Madagascar, the jagged mountains of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) and drawing out a few themes.
Other critics focus instead on digging beneath the pretty visuals and engaging stories to reveal the underlying workings of the game. You may never “finish” Destiny 2, a sprawling space opera taking place in a ruined solar system beset by alien invaders – but you can understand how developer Bungie subtly corrals millions of players into different experiences , capturing some with the game’s fast-paced shoot-out arenas, and others with its epic “raids” which take groups of friends many hours to complete.
Good games criticism can dissect an interactive experience into its constituent parts, but also understands the emotional effect of the story. Games are both things to watch and things to live in – and they demand a critical language that is deep and expressive. One day, through technologies such as virtual reality, games may even become indistinguishable from (and preferable to) reality. We are already living in a world where entertainment technology is pervasive – smartphones, social media, set-top boxes, AI assistants, chatbots, robots – so this stuff is important. Understanding video games means getting a grip on an increasingly game-like society.
In this sense, modern game critics seem like their film equivalents in the 1920s; they are still wrestling with this vast new medium, which is undergoing seismic shifts in form and meaning – but the biggest changes are yet to come.