A Dialogue with Joshua Rivera

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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The art of games criticism.

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Joshua Rivera is a critic. Writing beyond games, Joshua brings cultural commentary to games writing that is too often left out of specialist publications. His recent publication at Aftermath on the damning hype for Grand Theft Auto VI shows how our narrow perspective can transform the mediascape and industry into something rotten. This expanded upon takes I’ve seen Joshua post over the years, so I wanted to talk more deeply and explicitly about the shortcomings of games media with him. We talk about why we do criticism, the financial and editorial pressures shaping the horizon of discourse, and why the games industry shouldn’t exist.

Autumn Wright: You are a critic at large, but very much home in the games media space. I’m curious what your perspective is, having done a lot more writing in mainstream publications and doing criticism on other media as well.

Joshua Rivera: I’m kind of an odd duck in the space. I have worked at and for gaming publications, but it’s not really what I spend most of my time doing. I mostly write about games for non-gaming publications, for mainstream audiences. This is more common now than when I started ten years ago, but it still felt rare to be someone who was plugged in and could converse with the enthusiast, gaming-exclusive audience. It was still pretty common to have mainstream writers hold a condescending or simplistic approach to games. And that’s changed a lot, I think, which is ironic because there’s less writing than ever. So, I was aware of the fact that I was trying to nudge mainstream videogame discourse into a more substantial and meaningful direction, while also aware of the fact that people in the games media space had every reason to not listen to me and every reason to think I was a tourist.

I don’t bill myself as a games critic. It’s not good for my career prospects. That’s unfortunately the world we live in. But I also don’t like the assumptions that come with it. I value the distance that comes with being someone who is not enmeshed in this space because I’m very interested in the things we accept on a cultural level, the norms of critical discourse, and a lot of my thing is asking “Why do we got to do that? Does this really help anybody understand us? Are we understanding each other any better? Or are we just married to language that is devoid of meaning?”

I imagine that writing for Vulture instead of Polygon brings with it constraints about how you can talk about games, but also opens up ways to look at games divorced from what games media has made generic and what our readers expect us to publish. You’re less beholden to those expectations.  

Right. Yeah. It lets you adopt a stance like the one I take, which is if the game teaches you something, I’m not going to mention it. Unless it’s critical to my thesis or an argument I want to make, I don’t need to waste a hundred fifty words telling you about the block and parry system. A thing that informs a lot of my writing is that I am not trying to sell you on a game – or games in general. I was taught by newspapermen and the newspapery thing of journalism is you go where people can’t, where they don’t have the time to, and you tell them why a thing happened and why it was worthwhile. Like Five W’s shit. So, I am interested in producing a piece of writing that is worthwhile to read, that is worth reading, and it’s meaningful to me if I convince you to check something out, but I’m not writing for people who are already bought in. I’m not doing the consumer report type model. That never really interested me. I am writing for people who want to think a little more deeply about the work they engage with. And every piece, I try to broaden that conversation a little bit.

Do you feel like the kind of writing you get out of established games media is shaped by this idea that readers are being sold to?

Yeah, and part of it is just the SEO algorithmic automating of media where the only way that it feels like you’re being heard is through pure passion. Like “You need to see this!” or “This is fucking garbage!” This came up around GamerGate, the idea of being pro consumer. To me, it’s a dog whistle. “Is this thing worth your time?” “What kind of experience can you expect to have from this thing?” The constant comparative analysis. We’re just like “This thing is like this thing.” I hate the conversation where “Oh, it’s a deck building roguelike.” That doesn’t mean shit to anybody. It just tells you what you’re doing.

It’s very mechanical. Not in the game design sense, but where there are inputs and outputs and you are trying to tell the reader what the Skinner box is going to do for them.

It’s easy to say what something is but harder to articulate how it manages to make you feel a way.

Yeah, absolutely. And I sympathize. I don’t think everyone’s stupid. I think they’re disincentivized from doing that kind of writing on so many levels. For one, it’s hard to sell. The only reason I’ve had any success doing it is mostly because I am willing to use whatever tool I need to get you to read me. Sometimes that’s irreverence or a sense of humor, and other times it’s a grabby assertion and just trusting that I can land the plane or that the reader will follow me there. You have to earn their attention, but then also their trust. And that’s a lot of work. It’s really, really hard to do in a high-pressure digital media environment. How do I explain why a work is doing a thing, and a headline that meets stringent Google SEO guidelines, or how do I express this very subjective experience in a sentence? It’s not easy, and the way that I usually do it is I don’t start the conversation with videogames. I try to start the conversation elsewhere and then bring it back to videogames. And that’s because games are a way to engage with and understand others better, I think, and if I’m not sure how to explore that, if I’m not sure how a game explores that, then I’m not sure it would be worthwhile.

One thing I have appreciated about following you is how you try to emphasize that games media, be it journalists or critics, are not developers, and our interests do sometimes not align.

Yes.

There’s a sense of journalists being adversarial to power, but as a culture critic who is aligned with workers in these adjacent industries, would you describe your critical stance as adversarial to the games industry?

I don’t think it’s necessarily adversarial. There’s criticism as practice and criticism as career. And the same thing about journalism. As a journalist, as a person in an industry adjacent to another industry, it behooves you to be cordial and friendly and someone that people are willing to talk to and someone that people can trust and someone who will not betray that trust. The lines can get messy doing that work, where I don’t want to hurt this person’s feelings, which is why in the old days critics and reporters were different jobs. But when it comes to the practice of criticism, the work is separate from the people who made it. The work is out there, the piece of criticism is out there, and it’s all for the reader. It’s not for me or any studio or employee at a studio to feel good about themselves. That can be a byproduct of it, for sure, and I’d hope that even a negative review that I give is seen as thoughtful and interesting and worth considering even if you don’t agree with it. I don’t expect anybody to agree with anything. Speaking as a journalist, your first obligation is to tell people the truth. It’s not to prop up an industry. It’s not to support your friends or boost things. The work can do these things, it’s a byproduct of the work, but it’s not why you do it

Your Aftermath piece on GTA VI really illustrates the crisis of how games media is conflated with the games industry right now, because games media is not necessarily invested in the profitability of GTA VI, but it is constructing a reality where it is the biggest thing in the world.  

Yes.

Games media is manufacturing this reality. And as we’ve seen in some headlines and the general way that games criticism is understood to function, it is already going to be the “Game of the Year” and everything that means whenever it does come out. 

There is a sense of games media just being invested in there being a games industry. Which on the one hand, if I come out saying that shouldn’t be the case, that’s easy to misunderstand… [Laughs]

Some would say.

But it really shouldn’t! It is our job to tell people what is happening, and if this industry is destroying itself, we have to tell people that it’s happening. And if this industry is destroying itself, we have to tell people that it’s happening. It’s not for us to swoop in and save it or do our part. You see this happening with the consumer identity, where we’ve got to support the right things and not the wrong things. There’s all these ideas of how to be an ethical gamer and it’s just spending your money the right way. And I don’t know, man, you can make statements with how you spend your money, absolutely, or how you don’t spend your money, but it’s about building a personal sense of ethics and politics and not trying to repair an industry.

I believe games writers have so bought into the idea that they need the industry to survive that it keeps us from seeing things plainly. I’ve written a couple of these pieces, these pieces get written all the time, that this industry is a ruse. It’s an investment scheme. It’s a carnival trick. It’s not healthy. It’s not sustainable. We’ve known it’s not sustainable for going on a decade now at the very least is when it started to become quite plain. We’re seeing all of these signs going up and we’re not acting like the ship is going down, and I think that a lot of that comes down to the fact that we’re just invested in the games industry’s success and operating as if there is a right argument or movement or thing we can do to turn it around.

Do you think there is a place for a dedicated games media where you have sites like Polygon, IGN, Gamespot having journalists that specialize solely in games and critics who specialize solely in games? Is that a viable model? Not necessarily financially, but journalistically, ethically, critically. As opposed to writing at some of the places you do where a critic can write about many things and an outlet is not invested as heavily in the profitability and the output of a single entertainment industry.

I think it’s hard to separate that from the economics of it, because the form follows the function. Even at the publications that I write for, they’re still trying to sell ads and ad packages and build brands, and those brands involve savvy critics and sharp reporting, and that’s leveraged into events and other things. And so, I have to make sure that my criticism doesn’t sully that brand. I think it’s also part of the audience, what the audience expects. You have to decide who you’re writing for and who you’re not writing for.

You know that movie, The Player, Robert Altman? It’s a big studio satire. The fictional studio there has this catchphrase: Movies, now more than ever! And that’s how I feel about games, where a lot of people in games media are just—it’s tautology. Games are worth covering just because. And yeah sure, but why you? Why here? Why this way? And in what way? I could compare it to TV. I think TV matters, but what TV? Why? Do I see that value in reality TV? Do I see it in all reality TV? Is it just the Netflix style reality shows, or is it the exploitative Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Naked and Afraid exploitation thing going on?

I see so much that is just like “Games are so important, these things matter,” and I don’t know what that means. And people need to know what that means. People need to know why they matter, and if they matter if you don’t play them. And does every game matter? We kind of accept the fact that there is such a thing as an airport novel, there’s junk TV, but it’s verboten to suggest that about videogames.

Another problem is what consensus there exists in games media among the most platformed, most profitable voices, what they considered prestigious is probably literature’s airport books.

Yeah. And this is the common joke made about Kojima. A lot of his work is like, “What if a guy read an airport thriller and thought that was the coolest goddamn thing in the world?” It’s fine! I love that guy’s games. And that’s where the play comes in. If you reduce them to stories and ideas, they’re quite simple and not terribly profound.

But you don’t have an audience that has a broader context, that is wider read. You don’t have an audience that knows that a theme is not a one sentence adjective like a tag on Ao3.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s the other problem too, where people burn out and age out of games writing so much that you’re stuck in adolescence. The whole scene is in a level of arrested development. At least discussion of games. I understand there’s some level of this going on in the games industry where cultivating junior talent is hard because they are underpaid and they’re contractors, much like journalists. And they age out of that kind of grind because you can’t support a family on that kind of instability or just eke out a living in the expensive cities that a lot of studios are in. So, you have this perpetual juvenilia on both sides.

Do you think you’ve seen an actual decline in the maturity of the craft?

That’s a good question. I’ll put it this way: When I was starting out, this would have been early 2010’s, that was the Brainy Gamer, late aught’s crowd of people thinking about games and games critics and the Kill Screen generation working their way into the games press proper and elevating the level of conversation on these sites where the enthusiast audience would read them. We know how that turned out with GamerGate, and there was a regression. But after that the baseline was higher than it had been. With the decimation of digital media and the lack of interest in games media as a revenue generator for media organizations, there’s no incentive to elevate the craft, to be an exemplar of the craft or for smart criticism to be a part of your brand. So, it’s relegated to indie publications like Bullet Points and Unwinnable and Uppercut that have been around for a while now, but no one is making a living off of that.

I worked with Stephen Totilo at Kotaku and his whole thing was “News is what matters.” Reporting is what gets attention and that’s what it’s for. As a critic I was like, “I don’t know man,” and I think I won him over in some regards. He did employ me for a little bit. But when it comes down to it, there are ways to cover your ass with reporting that there aren’t when it comes to criticism. If you just say something as a critic, everybody’s like “Can you say that? Do we want that under the Masthead?” All these anxieties creep into the process and it’s not about making the piece better, it’s about “What’s it do for our brand?” That’s an important consideration, sure, but you can tell the truth without hiding behind a source sometimes. And that’s a very ungenerous characterization of reporting, but I feel deeply that this institutional reluctance to say things that are true with your own editorial voice has led to a lot of the problems that we have. You see that on every level, it’s not just the games media. There’s nobody on the New York Times editorial board saying “Trans people are people, what’s the big deal?” It’s couched in the acknowledgment of “There are critics of this view,” “This thing might be true but some people say this.”

I like that idea, that the critic is the person who says the thing and has the opinion and says it loudly. And instead we’ve been trained in journalistic sourcing displacing any possible blowback that could come from that, which is used perniciously by a place like The New York Times to manufacture consent, but also by fandoms to say “Let people enjoy things,” and it becomes thought terminating into what we can actually say, write, but also what we think.

I worry sometimes I come across as a bit of a curmudgeon. [Laughs] And it’s like, I’m not immune to that!

I think a lot of people would say I’m a killjoy, but I love games. I have Xenoblade Amiibo’s.

I’m wearing a Xenogears T-shirt right now.

I understand that we are on a knife-edge all the time. I am a little befuddled by the response to that being to lower our standard, to not say true things. Maybe a mean comparison to make, but that’s sort of Democratic party. “Let’s focus on things that are mean tested.” Means tested criticism. It’s very self-evident the second you take a few steps back. I don’t think games are good or bad. And if you press me, I’d say maybe they’re evil. They’re very much about manipulating the lizard brain. And film was also manipulative, but we have a century of scholarship examining that to contextualize our responses to it. Games has some of that scholarship, but it also has a critical consensus that ignores it. It holds everything back. If you want games to be these beautiful vehicles for exploring humanity or connection or any of these other things you think they can be, it’s a terrible thing to restrict the kinds of conversations we can have about them because you’re worried about your job or the industry or audience reaction.

I’m a brown man, but I am straight. I do get some shit but there are other people who get it worse and I’m not saying those people deserve anything other than the best of what humanity has to offer. Our institutional failure to value this writing is why people like myself or people who present as women or trans or any other marginalized background get such invective. I’ve never felt from a major publication in games that “We are here for our marginalized writers, we are interested in their institutional criticism – We hire them for op ed-eds and that’s it.” It becomes this circular thing where if you’re not invested in the truth of someone’s perspective, then I don’t really know if you’re invested in that community.

It’s unfortunate that it feels like we’re not just talking to audiences about that. It feels like in games media, we have to talk to other writers about that, who still don’t speak up about Gamergate, who seem embarrassed and don’t know what to do when confronted with prose, and who perpetuate these ideas about games that let audiences behave the way they do when writing makes them uncomfortable.

This was a thing I harped on during my time at Kotaku. I was only there for nine months. There were some calls I wanted to make from inside the house. I wrote about it in the context of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It was the penitent and prostrate wording of a delay towards the audience, extremely apologetic, like “Please don’t hate us.” You know the language. It was commonplace. And it still happens where a game gets delayed and they’re so apologetic to the fans. Then it goes beyond apologetic, almost penitent. Why? What are they afraid of? And what have we done for our part to cultivate this sort of mentality?

I don’t think there are as many writers with this problem as there used to be, but the publications are run by people that do have this mentality of games are just too important to them. And it’s not just the games., it’s their relationship to games and that affection. There’s a lack of an impulse to turn that affection to criticism, or how that affection can translate to criticism. Harper Jay on their way out wrote that piece “Games Criticism Is A Kindness” and the idea to treat games as worthy of serious thought, or even irreverent thought. I take the job very seriously, but sometimes the job is not being serious.

Games as worthy of the rigor of given to other media and the need to cheerlead for games is so suffuse and the top layer of a lot of videogame publications that mostly existed until recently. That streak of advocacy is poisonous to criticism. And I don’t think as many critics have that mentality as there used to be, but the people who have the money to give critics, you have to get over their skepticism. And a lot of times I did that by being funny, but it’s tricky. And now we’re left with this fragmented environment where everyone is jaded and embittered and exhausted, and there was no institutional practice of showing people that, like what you’re saying about prose earlier, showing each other and the audience all the things that writing can do for games and about games.

Every once in a while, people show up and try something, and then they either wash out or they end up doing the other stuff to just get paid. Renata Price during her time was very big on taking a poetic lens to criticism. Ashley Bardhan now does some of that too, but she’s largely doing it independently. Bringing some of that character to her day work. But if she wants to really get down like she did with that Suda51 opus, she’s got to do that on her own time. This feels like beating a nonexistent horse anymore, but people aren’t going to let a writer for a games publication do the Jon Bois 17776 situation. We had the chance to be truly expansive, and we couldn’t get over the fact that we loved games too much.

I’m imagining an editor reading Hanif Abdurraqib and saying “Okay, but you’re not talking about the music?”  

Yeah! I’m sure Hanif would look at They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and some of his prose poetry in there and maybe he wouldn’t be as hot on it as he was in the moment (I still think it’s great), but people were open to letting him do it. That book in particular is interesting because it’s a lot of pieces that he did on MTV News when it was a blog. And why not try? Why?

The final question I had written down was: As a critic, how would you approach writing about GTA VI?

[Laughs] Fuck that question.

[Both laugh]

Again, I do really think you have to consider your audience and the publication that you’re writing for. I really hate the speculation of considering something that doesn’t exist for engaging with, which is the crux of the piece I wrote for Aftermath. But I think any conversation about Grand Theft Auto VI has to account for the fault lines that the whole thing rests on. I think part of the opportunity of a game like Grand Theft Auto VI is that it’s one of those solar eclipse events where everyone’s gonna look at it. It is the final form of big budget videogames. This is the last one. Whatever it does well and whatever it does poorly, both in my estimation and as a commercial product, is representative of or an indictment of the games industry as a whole.

The thing that we have built, or we have observed being built, has led to this. Both on the media side as observers and boosters, and on the games industry side as a technofetishist enterprise, where games is a mastery of technology, bending it to our will, and being a thing worth disappearing into. Which is the thesis of Simon Parkin’s Death by Video Game, this idea that we can create something with technology that you can play to the point where you’ll die at the keyboard, something that engrossing. Even though that’s existed for decades now, games that engrossing and the manipulation that makes us susceptible to them, we’re still chasing that as an ideal. We’re still trying to build forever games and I think any honest criticism of that game would be a criticism of that pursuit. What have we done?

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Autumn Wright is a critic of all things apocalyptic. Follow them @theautumnwright.bsky.social.