Kotaku
Rock critic Chuck Klosterman asks, in the July '06 issue of Esquire, "Why are there no video-game critics?" In a piece titled 'The Lester Bangs of Video Games', Klosterman rehashes a postulation familiar to any fan of games and games journalism.
Lester Bangs is known for his use of the term "the last of the white niggers," a reference to not only Norman Mailer's essay 'The White Negro', but also, as Wikipedia eloquently sums, a "social miscreant with questionable or objectionable outward idiosyncrasies." It's a term that, ignoring the racial characterization of all involved, could as easily describe the perception of modern gamers by the publishing world at large.
The problem isn't a lack of suitably high-brow game criticism—it's that Klosterman and his peers have placed gamers and game culture in a metaphorical ghetto. They're acting as the very same established cultural stagnancy that critics like Bangs and Kael were bucking.
The fundamental flaw in Klosterman's premise is this: There are plenty of game critics who "[think] about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual" (as Klosterman establishes the benchmark for what determines 'real' criticism). However, Klosterman isn't reading them, having lumped all game magazines into a pile he labels "consumer advice." Lumped—and ignored completely.
The very fact that Klosterman can get a column in Esquire writing about a subject area about which he is obviously unfamiliar highlights the real issue: mainstream magazine editors don't know anything about gaming, making it difficult for them to hire game critics worth their salt.
There are other flaws in his reasoning. Klosterman mistakes video games for virtual worlds, using a hypothetical Gone with the Wind scenario: "What if the conversation were sometimes interrupted by a bear attack? And what if all these alternative realities were dictated by the audience itself?" How many games have you played lately had dialogue interrupted by a bear attack? (An unscripted bear attack, at least.)
Like Roger Ebert before him, Klosterman conflates his lack of understanding and familiarity with an entire art form to be a failure of the critics of that art form. Meanwhile, dozens of ably-minded writers are dissecting, analyzing, and contextualizing everything from simple puzzle games to—yes—virtual worlds.
Lester Bangs made his career writing for music magazines. For Klosterman to toss out the entirety of the gaming enthusiast press' work because it shows up in EDGE and not the New Yorker shows only that he's too modest a fan of video games to know where the real magic is happening.
As long as editors of magazines keep printing articles bemoaning the absence of a 'Lester Bangs of game criticism'—an editorial messiah for which erudite gamers have thankfully stopped looking—they'll continue to miss out on all the meaningful games criticism that's happening right now.
