Play This Thing has found it's way into my aggregator recently... it's a good read, and great way to get exposed to a wide variety of games. Lo and behold, today they deviated from their normal pleasantries and posted this overwhelmingly negative Review of Game Criticism.
Even though Costik occasionally takes the high horse in this essay, his subject matter and treatment immediately resonated with me. I found myself seduced by the sharpie-thick line he draws between criticism and review as the difference between treatment as Product and Art. It reminded me of Chuck Klosterman's piece on the absence of meaningful game writing from a couple years ago, which in turn reminded me of all the flak he got for his assertion.
I'm fresh from the Experimental Gaming Workshop, and my Gut tells me that there ARE other people out there doing game criticism IN GAMES. I feel like there must be solid blocks of critical writing out there as well, I even feel like I've read them, but I can't give that feeling the weight of proof. Not a single name comes to mind and stays there.
I'm stuck with a few questions that you heavier minds might be able to answer:
1) Is he right? Is there really nothing out there but an avalanche of znet ratings and unrefined, impressionistic bloggins?
2) Would the sort of academic critiques Costik describes actually stimulate our medium, or would that sort of reasoned, discursive and potentially ouroboric thinking be a sign of some stagnation? Are we rolling too fast for the moss to gather?