Guy Who Doesn’t Like Stuff

Note from the author: 

I don’t know what sparked it but there have been several articles recently about the state or nature of written criticism. When I was younger, I think I wrote several kind of “who watches the Watchmen?”-type articles about videogame criticism, and now I’m older I find the fact that I did that quite embarrassing, partly because it was all masturbatory on my behalf, and partly because I’m not sure where I got off telling people how they should and shouldn’t write. For those reasons, I’ve resisted writing anything like that for a while now. This article is pretty navel gazey and self-indulgent, and so, if you’re put off by that, I thought it was worth putting this disclaimer on the top, not just for your sake, but also mine, so you might not read this and think I’ve disappeared completely inside myself.

But I am also aware that doing this hand-wringing, neurotic, pre-apologetic kind of “routine” becomes part of the self-indulgence. I just don’t have a solution right now that would satisfy all parties.

———

In an earlier draft of this column, I wrote something about how, in 2025, I was going to make an effort to write more about games – or aspects of games – that I like. If historically I’ve tried to describe through writing what I think a good videogame is, I’ve almost always attempted to achieve that through anti-examples, to characterize what I think is “bad” in order to define, by implication, what is “good”.

I’ve been writing about games professionally for almost 15 years and if I have developed any kind of reputation as a critic, I’m aware that that reputation is as somebody who is perennially hard to please. I worry that, as a videogame critic, I’m at risk of cultivating a “character” – of becoming The Guy Who Doesn’t Like Stuff. And that to me is Hell. If it gets to the point where readers are even marginally preoccupied by what an article suggests about me as opposed to what it says about the game, that represents an acute professional failure on my behalf (with this article, which I’ve tried to make patently clear is and will be about me, as a reluctant exception).

It’s a fine but extremely significant division. If people want to read what I think about a game, I’m flattered. If people want to read my takedown of a game, and come to every article anticipating my disinclination – even if my disinclination is what they enjoy reading about – that means something has gone profoundly wrong. It’s a mathematical certainty, representable on graphs and 3D models: The more that your writing about videogames (x) is equivalent or approximate in style to the writing of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (y), the less its critical value (z) to anybody.

Writing about games or parts of games that I like also allows me to clarify something, to myself if not to readers, which is that videogames are and always have been the most important thing in my life. That’s not the same as saying that I love videogames. I don’t love videogames. I don’t love videogames as a rule, because that would be anti criticism and tantamount, especially in the context of modern videogame culture, to consumerism. So what I mean is that I’ve always been occupied by videogames – not the games themselves, per se, but the conversations, both with other people and with myself, that the games provoke.

Whether the game is good, or bad, or very good, or very bad, I am similarly animated to think about it, which isn’t to say that I am “grateful” for the existence and creation of games, and think they’re all beautiful snowflakes, uniformly worthy of attention, but that, before playing, I consider every game equally as probable of generating from me some kind of meaningful reaction. I don’t think that games, as an aggregated concept, are “important”.’ I also don’t care whether a game is good, or a game developer is successful, or if games gain any kind of wider or more credible cultural acceptance. I have absolutely no stake in the “success” of videogames – if videogames stopped existing, I would make my living another way, and whether or not games, as a form, attain some kind of higher artistic status has nothing to do with me as a critic. It’s not my job to help games or game-makers with anything. Although every game is of course informed by other games around it and no game exists in a vacuum, I feel that my only responsibility as a critic is to apprehend every game on its own terms; to understand what the makers of the game are trying to achieve and then clarify and judge to what extent that would-be goal has been met. I don’t consider myself part of gaming, or reliant on or beholden to the culture or business or artistic maturation of games.

Put in a more illustrative way, I love the work of Greg Heffernan, better known as Cosmo D. But if Cosmo D released a new game and I thought it was bad, and I had the opportunity to write about it, I would write that I thought it was bad. On the contrary, I think Fortnite is one of the most ugly and insidious things that mankind has ever made in the name of entertainment, but if I played Fortnite 2 and thought it was good, I would write that it was good. At the risk of sounding hostile or provincial, if I were to write about games from the perspective of wanting games to succeed or always wanting the best for the games, that is, always going into playing a game hoping that it will be good, I’d feel like a fool. Games, as a concept, don’t – can’t – care about me or my “success.” I don’t expect (or want, or need) any game developer to care either. It’s not that games, game-makers and me are enemies. But we’re not in this together, and I trust that all stakeholders in the ill-defined transaction between developer and critic understand and respect that truth.

Being “uncompromising” breaks both ways. If you aim to be sincere when talking about what you don’t like, I think it’s easier to be sincere when talking about what you do like. If you hold something back when writing about why you don’t like a game, I feel that a dishonesty creeps into your work, meaning that when you want to write about why you like a game, it sounds less fulsome. In the cases of critics who dislike something against the consensus or more than the consensus, I find that when they like or love something, they like and love it in ways that are more meaningful.

I think one of my greatest failures as a critic is that I’m less capable of explaining my reasons for liking and admiring a game than I am of explaining why I don’t like a game, largely because I haven’t given myself the practice. It’s also because there are more games that I don’t like than there are games that I like, and because a large quotient of videogame criticism belongs to the grotesquely oxymoronic genre of “enthusiast” criticism, and I’ve always believed that a lot of people find that alienating and want to read something with different timbre.

But I haven’t committed as much time, effort and vocabulary to the games that I like, or the things about games that I like. I don’t want to turn into The Guy Who Doesn’t Like Stuff, most of all because that would not be representative of reality.

With that in mind, here is a list of games that I have completed this year that I like: Moves of the Diamond Hand, Keep Driving, No Skin, Dead Trash, Tempest Rising, Cold Fear, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, RoadCraft, Doom: The Dark Ages, Dagger Directive, Anoxia Station, Alpha Response.

———

Edward Smith is a writer from the UK who co-edits Bullet Points Monthly.