A Dialogue with Nick Capozzoli
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #186. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
———
The art of games criticism.
———
Nick Capozzoli is an architect and critic, the first of this series who does not work primarily as a writer. Nick is also the New York Video Games Critics Circle’s Journalism Chair, heading the selection for the Games Journalism Award that recognizes substantial work by critics and journalists in the field every year. There were surprisingly few pieces of games criticism that very directly engaged with this issue’s theme, but I found it a good reason to revisit Nick’s “A Review of a ChatGPT Review of The Last of Us Part Two.” I also had to talk about his recently published essay on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, “La Vie Chauvin,” in Bullet Points Monthly, which I’ll certainly return to again when I write on open worlds myself. We talk about how GamerGate showed us what we could anticipate from the rise of AI, how open worlds can be reactionary too, and why the state of the craft is – though untenable – still strong.
Autumn Wright: Why did you want to write about AI and ChatGPT back in 2023?
Nick Capozzoli: When I decided to write about it, it was probably the first release of ChatGPT. It had been out for a couple weeks, so I had been hearing NPR reports and stuff where they’re talking about students using it for papers, things like that. It was so buzzy at that moment that I was like maybe I could get a quick hit or piece here where I plug something into this ChatGPT thing. See what it’ll do for a Last of Us review, what will that look like. And I figured it would have ongoing relevance, which I think has borne out. Really quickly you could see that this is something that’s going to be a major issue going forward. I think I wrote in the piece that even if something seems a little bit silly when it comes to tech, and we know this in the video game industry for sure, stuff that could be silly and inane and poorly thought out doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be a consequence for you as a journalist. That was maybe one of the main messages of 2014.
I think you say that it’s kind of just getting forced on us. They choose to do that even if it doesn’t work.
I had a tweet a way back where I said make fun of the video game industry at your own peril because whatever stupid thing is happening to us in that moment, it’s going to happen to you in about, say, a year and a half’s time. It’ll find its way.
Your criticism ends with the argument that this is going to most impact marginalized writers by creating impersonators, bots, to manufacture a fake minority group to assent or be more extreme.
When you think about the utility of AI to conservatives, especially to conservatives in the video game scene, what they had been reacting to in 2014 was really a very small subset of minority games critics and journalists speaking to their perspective. And the pushback for it really boiled down to “This isn’t the common experience,” “What would the average gamer think about these games,” “I don’t want to hear about how this game has this racist portrayal and what that means to you as a Black person, because I’m not a Black person and I can’t empathize with that,” and “I want to hear about whether it does the things I want it to do, which is be fun and have good graphics.”
With GamerGate you had this weird sock puppet movement, #NotYourShield, where they started in mass using bots and fake personalities on Twitter to go after people and seed this false flag movement about minorities supporting GamerGate and piling on the feminist critics or whoever was trying to do their job. So, thinking back to that, who’s going to make the most use out of these tools?
What I saw very quickly was it pump out this language to the extent of “Well, ya know, there’s been some controversy about the game” vis-à-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict, “but it’s important to know –” this is the language that it returns to, “it’s important to know that the game is not political.” So, if you’re looking at ChatGPT, it’s going to give you something that’s going to wash out the voices of the smaller population of minority writers and critics that are saying something different. Just by sheer volume you can get it to return thousands and thousands of results that will either wipe them off the board or you can use thrown voice and kind of obliviate their positions. It’s super useful for reactionaries.
And I think we’ve also seen that it did impact economically marginalized people, and it’s affecting people who would write news stories and guides. It’s taking those jobs away from younger writers.
And they love it for that too. It came out more recently, but I’ve been rereading Gareth Watkins’s piece in The New Socialist about AI and fascism, and it’s a central point of what he writes there that these government groups that make use out of it, it’s almost a secondary benefit of it because it expresses to people “Your job could be next. You’re not important. We can wipe it off the face of the earth.”
ChatGPT is also coalescing stuff that it found online, so it is interesting to see how it is reflecting a little bit of what it took. Can we read into what that says about the more mainstream discourse?
Probably. I try not to fall to the trap of thinking that this thing is thinking – it’s returning stuff that it finds online. And what I wrote at the time was that you can kind of read into the tea leaves little bits of Wikipedia-speak. When somebody is writing a Wikipedia entry on, say, The Last of Us, they might touch upon “Some critics have taken issue with this sort of thing,” and then the natural impulse if you’re writing one of these things is you find the counterpoint. And then you appear even-handed and like you’ve given a balanced understanding of something. It’s also a journalistic impulse too. I think this is something especially that you see at the larger news outlets like in the New York Times, this point-counterpoint framing, the veneer of objectivity that you get when you present “both sides” of an issue, whether or not it has one or not. If you suggest that they’re both of even merit, then you appear impartial. You can present yourself as a journalist without bias. And that’s a lot of writing online that that fits that bill. So if a large language model is going to be pulling from places like this, which we know it does (we know that the New York Times has been a big source for these because they’ve countersued about it), that’s going to seed a lot of the model for a [Large Language Model] and it’s going to be repeated back to you.
What made you want to write something for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? What’s your motivation for writing when you do?
I try to make everything that I do topical, connecting games to the broader culture and whatever the zeitgeist is at the moment. I want anything that I write to be able to be read five, ten years later, and still feel like it was relevant and it’s speaking to something other than the graphics. In the case of Kingdom Come, that piece was just because I was asked by Reid [McCarter] and the guys at Bullet Points and I was like “Sure.” Whatever the game is, I’m always happy to write for them because they give me a lot of leeway to do that. And if I want to make it about, in this case chauvinism and the way that it relates to an open world video game, especially a historical one with the history that Kingdom Come has, then they give me the room to do that and I can play around and take a few extra weeks to punch it up into something that speaks to a little bit more than “Is the game good or not?”
I think something I’m going to take away from it is the framing of open world games as the “so-called far center.”
Yeah, that came from Andrea Long Chu’s piece, a really great take down of erstwhile New York Times’s opinion columnist Pamela Paul. It’s kind of an apples to oranges thing, but I loved her description of this far center that Paul represents, where it’s notionally liberal. And the open world has that too. It’s all permissivity. You can do whatever you want. But it’s also reactionary. And I thought that was just a perfect description for something like Kingdom Come, where you have Daniel Vavra, the creative director, and his pro-GamerGate and reactionary politics. I think the weakest elements of that game are the parts that are the open world, in which they resemble almost any other open world game. You can do whatever you want, it rewards whatever you do, it’s very permissive. You feel like the game isn’t giving you any friction.
It will stand up to time. Reading it made me think about how a lot of the other criticism that I read is not in that mode. I imagine you have an interesting perspective working on the journalism award for what games writing is doing, and I’m curious if you’ve seen any trends over the past decade. Particularly like with nominations, what people think good games writing is.
I think it feels like it’s a little bit more focused. Back when we started doing the journalism award, that was in the era when outlets were still reviewing every single release that came out if they could get their hands on it. Hundreds and hundreds of reviews. So now I think people are, they’re not swinging at every pitch. They’re saving them for the big tent pole releases. But when they do them, it’s not that hard now for me to find ones that are trying to make something special out of the review . . . Edwin Evans-Thirlwell wrote a wonderful piece about [Kingdom Come Deliverance 2] and talked about the history going back to the first game, Vavra’s GamerGate participation, and the current reactionary boom that’s going to attack him now because the game has one Black person in it. To be able to bring that all to what is ostensibly the Rock Paper Shotgun review and make it something bigger, that’s something I’m seeing. It’s much easier for you to find it now, that’s what any site’s doing.
The flip side of that is that the industry has been hollowed out. Reviews don’t make money. It’s guides that are the lost leader that brings everyone in there, but guides are pretty prosaic. I’ve tried to find ways to bring that into the journalism award. I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around what makes a good guide, what would a guide that ends up on a short list for the journalism award look like. But people are pretty desperate for work right now and guides writers are stretched super thin. I don’t think there’s a lot of room for them to play that way. But a critic, they can do that for sure.
Something that comes up in games writing discourse is the friction of journalists and critics and guides writers and content creators all homogenized into this one thing. We get accused of things that other people in the field are doing, that we might disagree with and not practice. The Critics Circle just has this one award for writing. Have you all thought about having another award that separates reporting from criticism?
It’s come up a couple of times. My position on it has been to let it just be mushy and flexible. It means we don’t have to start getting pedantic . . . And that’s the approach that I’ve generally taken to the idea of a games journalism award. Is this piece technically about video games if it’s about hardware or if it’s about chess? If it can bear out a little bit, when we do our long list, I put it on there and we can have a debate about whether or not it fits in.
I like to keep it open ended. I like the idea of the award to be expansive for games journalism rather than restrictive. I want to have a big tent, and I want people to be thinking What can games journalism be? What can criticism be? What can it look like? How can I change it, break out of the box? And that’s better for the art and more interesting for a reader who tunes into the awards.
And do you feel like the field is doing that year after year?
I think so, yeah. I feel like I’ve got plenty of room to play around with it. We’ve shortlisted people that have been forum posters. It hasn’t made our shortlist yet but I’ve long-listed pieces that were just poetry inspired by games. I’ve looked at criticism that was done in the form of painting. It’s nice when you have aggregators like Critical Distance or Super Culture, Patreon people that are always sharing each other’s work, it makes it a lot easier to find some of the smaller blogs and the people that are playing around at the margins with this kind of thing outside of the major sites. I’ve gotten better about sourcing those myself, too. I have to keep myself on social media and get myself plugged into the Discords so I can be there when people are sharing this stuff.
What should we do with games writing right now? Do you have bigger thoughts about games criticism in this moment?
It depends on your goals. If we’re talking about basic career stability, I don’t, I don’t have any good answers there. If you are earnestly interested in pushing the medium forward, doing it for the sake of the art, I think that that’s wide open. You can consider yourself freed up from the idea that you need to present the most hirable version of yourself. And I’d say play around, do something different, shake the trees. That’s the stuff that I love to read, so maybe you get a games journalism award out of it.
Do you think there are conversations that we aren’t having?
In 2014 and 2015 we lost a lot of people that were just starting to decide that they could do something in this field, and the experience that they had rightly put them off it. I would have loved to see the stuff that they were doing, like Mattie Brice, Leigh Alexander, people like that who I looked up to when I was starting writing and doing criticism, but they’re not working there anymore. And I don’t know what they would have said if they were still doing this stuff, but it would have been different and new, so we have to find a way to get that stuff back.
———
Autumn Wright is a critic of all things apocalyptic. Follow them @theautumnwright.bsky.social.
