Most video game writing is still stuck in the “review” mode - “you should buy this game because of these reasons.” “This game rules more than other similar games, and here’s why.”
But with any medium, the theorists and thinkers eventually arise who take writing about their subject to the next level.
Who’s doing this with video games? Who’s really digging deep and doing gonzo video game journalism? Who’s having amazing insights and thoughts about games and their place in reality and culture?
Good question. Perhaps video/computer games are considered too “lowbrow” for any modern- day philosophical types to touch on the deeper aspects (if they exist in the first place) of video games.
Doesn’t this question take it as a given that there’s as much, and as much of value, and as much of as *much *value, to write about *in *video games as there is in music? Don’t get me wrong; I’m not dismissing them out of hand. I’m just suggesting that the things that “serious” critics write about in music–or art or movies or whatever–are not necessarily the same things that people who value video games, value *in *video games.
That is to say, do the things that people enjoy about video games *necessarily *lend themselves to the kind of writing you’re talking about? I’m not convinced of it yet. Personally, mind you.
No doubt there are video games and video games. And no doubt, as the games evolve, a Bangsian chronicler will make himself (or herself) heard. (How old was the Rock and the Roll before serious critics took it seriously?) But I don’t think it’s a given that such a thing should already have happened by now.
Lissener’s right. The OP assumes that there is a subtext in video games.
I absolutely think so.
This whole train of thought got started when I was playing the original The Legend of Zelda earlier today on the Nintendo Wii. It was a game I played obsessively 20 years ago, and it’s pretty much the first time I’ve played it since. I was shocked at just how ridiculously overpowering the sense of legitimate place the game brought to me - it literally felt like visiting an old house that you lived in or a town that you used to live in that you haven’t visited in 20 years. I mean, we’re talking about incredibly simple pixels and repeated tiles on a screen, and it literally felt like I was returning to a real place that I had once been, in a truly overwhelming way. I then started thinking about the way that games in the franchise have evolved in those 20 years, and the way that they’ve morphed and mutated those very simple concepts and representations into much more complicated things while still retaining their sameness - it’s like urban development or something but in a completely simulated sense.
Maybe I’m this Bangs character. I should start a blog. 
That’s how it will begin; not with a whimper, but with a blog.
Well, video games have existed for over thirty-five years, dating from the original Pong cabinet released by Atari in 1972. I’m pretty sure people were writing serious criticism of rock’n’roll before the mid-eighties.
But, that’s not really a fair comparison. While rock’n’roll was new, music certainly wasn’t. Video games are arguably the first wholly new artform since the invention of the novel. There’s really no other artform that compares to it. It borrows elements from a number of other artforms, particularly the cinema, and so is often compared to those forms to its own detriment. The best video game ever won’t ever be as good as the best movie ever, when compared using the criteria of a good movie. But videogames work in an entirely different manner than movies. Many of the truly great video games use cinematics that don’t compare to the visuals in the absolute worst works of the cinema. Many of the great video games have writing that would make Danielle Steele blush with embarassment. Because what makes a video game work as an artform is not the narrative (although it helps) or the cinematics (although it helps) but rather the game play mechanic. And there’s no analog to compare that to in other art forms. Once people started recognizing how much depth the genre held, rock’n’roll could be compared to earlier forms of music, and take concepts and vocabulary from that. The early cinema critics could borrow from the theater critics. Serious video game critics have to start, literally, from ground zero, creating entirely new paradigms of quality and expression to define what makes a video game uniquely a video game, and why that’s important artistically.
Look at something as simple as Tetris. This is probably the single most succesful video game ever made. There are thousands and thousands of different iterations of this game. The number of hours cumulatively spent by people playing this came in incalcuable. But what draws them to it? There’s no story to it at all. There’s no characters. There’s really no music - there’s a distinctive Tetris theme that we all remember from the arcade version, but that music isn’t central to the experience, the way the music is central to, say, the opera. We’ve likely all played versions of Tetris that didn’t include that particular music at all, and found that the gameplay itself - the thing that makes Tetris Tetris - is unchanged.
Critics from other mediums dismiss video games as being unable to reveal anything profound about the human condition. But people have spent hundreds of hours of their lives fitting little colored blocks together. Tell me that isn’t expressing something fundamental about the human condition. The problem is, we’re still trying to figure out what it’s telling us about the human condition, because no other artform has ever touched on that aspect of humanity in the way video games do. It’s entirely uncharted territory, and we’re only now starting to map it out. But to do that, we need to get away from the expectations of other media: you can’t map the new world if you assume it’s going to be the same shape as the old one.
I mean, it seems to me that what serious critics write about–in movies, at least, which is the closest relative to video games on the evolutionary tree as I understand it–is the stuff beyond the simple surface plot. Right? Criticism is rarely simply a plot synopsis, right? But videogames–and again, I acknowledge that there are videogames and videogames–are almost entirely “about” what happens, since that’s the player’s involvement. In fact, what a player gets out of videogame is the the *fact *that he’s making what happens, happen. This is A) the least interesting level on which to seriously discuss *any *work, and B)–and this is where videogames are unique–highly subjective. Even more subjective than the opinion of a critic: the actual facts of the “plot” is subjective in a videogame, because it’s different depending on the player. This as-many-plots-as-there-are-audience-members aspect of videogames will necessarily make any approach to serious criticism–beyond the level of the review–well, different from movie or music criticism.
Additionally, it seems inarguable to me that most creators of videogames–I’m sure there are exceptions, as in any such discussion–are at that stage in the evolution of the medium where the surface level (what happens and what it looks like when it happens) is close to 100% of what they’re focusing on. I’d say it’s likely that you’ll have to wait for the next generation or two of videogames as an artform for the next generation of criticism to emerge.
All very interesting, of course. But still, it’s possible that the context is far more complex than the content, which is where the separation remains. That people play tetris for untold hours (the context) is no doubt revealing. What tetris is “about” (the content) may not be the place to look.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not a particularly interesting movie; the behavior that people have built up around it, however, is. I think that videogames “happen” in an analogous place. At least, up to now.
In other words, again, content versus context. The OP is addressing, mostly, content; Lester Bangs wrote about the content more than the context; ditto Roger Ebert (or name your poison criticwise). I think, to most people at any rate, the context of videogames (why we play them for so many hours) is more interesting than the content (colored blocks fall on top of other colored blocks).
For many works of art, it’s not so much the content of the art, but the context in which it was made, and the effect it had in its time. The Beatles had memorable music, but they’re mainly remembered for their impact on culture.
For those who have played Earthbound for SNES, here is a very detailed article that describes the artistic merit of the game sort of in line with the OP (spoilers for those who haven’t played it).
And make sure you get an annual flu shot.
Sometimes I wonder if that next generation of games will emerge, or if game companies will keep chasing the new surfaces made possible by the next generation of consoles. I think that’s another factor that makes games very difficult to compare to other media–the technology changes so quickly that there’s a constant battle just to keep up with it, and there are no signs that it’ll slow down any time soon.
I’ve had that same uncanny feeling mentioned in the OP: That a memorable game is not a thing, but a place. I’ve even taken it to another level: I routinely find places in real life similar to, or evincing a feeling like, a place in a video game. And I’ll often find places in video games reminescent of ones I know in real life. (I do the same thing with books. Certain books belong in certain areas, and as an extension, are best read there if possible.)
I am going to respectfully disagree (or rather, expand upon) something lissener said: That the “plot” of a video game is different for everyone. To this I will reply: Why shouldn’t the same be true for other media? I once read a marvelous essay in which the author took Hamlet with her on an anthropological expidition–if I recall correctly, she was visiting Australian aboriginies, though I’m not sure. She then talked to them about their interpretations of the story. Some of what they told her was similar to what a Western literary analysist would see in the story, but some of it was radically different. Every person brings their own interpretation of a story to that story, regardless of the media that story is presented through. Just as there are many ways to play through a game, a person will always bring his or her own experiences into a story. The things a person has seen and the way they think will necessarily influence the way they see a particular plot.
I think that makes a very interesting point. Perhaps the things video games have to reveal about the oft-pondered human condition are not revealed in the games themselves, but in the ways people react to them. The way people react to any relative novelty is pretty telling. The things that become popular have something to say about our societal mindset. One of the most fundamental and interesting questions underlying the whole thing is, “Why do the things that make a good game make a good game?” Why do we value certain traits above others in games? It’s fairly easy to see a precident for good graphics in art and good music in–the entire human species’ musical history–but what about gameplay elements? It’s very true that video games are quite unlike anything else we’ve ever had before. We do still have to dissect them. But there’s a lot there to dissect and study.
On the other hand, maybe you missed the “cyberspace” boat by about fifteen or twenty years
Because video games are really just a small piece of the cyberspace movement, which received a lot of attention in academia and other places, especially around the early 1990s. You might want to start off by checking out folks like Howard Rheingold or Brenda Laurel (but be aware that Rheingold is a journalist, not a scientist, so take his work with a grain of salt).
Regarding the feeling of “being there” that you mention, the term for this in the virtual reality domain is “the sense of presence”. There’s been a lot of thought and study given to this, though people are still working out what’s what. You might want to go to a good college library and page through some back issues of Presence (this is a journal put out by MIT Press).
For some strange reason, I am really excited to know that there is a phrase for “the sense of presence.” Perhaps it’s because there’s finally a word for something I’ve felt all my life. Even when I was younger, certain picture books were like “places” for me. Wow.
Oh, another phrase to search on is “media space”.
A couple of other fun things to think about (though you might want to smoke some pot first ):
-Imagine that you have a VR system with a head-mounted display connected to a remote camera system. You point this back at your physical body. Where is the you in the system?
-Take something like a pen or a ruler, hold it at one end, and run the other end over a rough surface. You feel the rough texture of the surface, right? …Wrong: You’re actually feeling a set of vibrations transmitted by the intermediate device (the pen or whatever). This impression that you’re actually feeling the surface itself is known as distal attribution. What does it say about the boundary of that-which-is-you?
And the search term you want for this is “reader-response theory”.
Observations on our ability to abstractly extend our sense of self are not new. If you get rear-ended on the street, you don’t say to the other driver, “your car hit my car,” you say, “you hit me.”
I don’t really know this Lester Bangs person, but would Tycho Brahe (aka Jerry Holkins) of the Penny Arcade Blog qualify here?