THE SPECTACULAR LEVIATHAN PART II

So I want to be extremely clear and careful as I write this: I am absolutely not shitting on any individual critic or creator who does the thing I’m going to be talking about in this rant. This isn’t even one of those “if you think this applies to you, heehee, I guess the shoe fits” things. There are many, many people who are right this second doing the thing I’m going to be criticizing whose work I love. And I can find stellar examples of the kind of work I’m going to be criticizing. This is not to say that this form of work is bad or invalid. I am sorry for the preamble, but in this, I absolutely don’t want to be misconstrued.

I don’t think I’m a big fan of where “criticism” writ large is headed. Sure, I’m talking mostly about games criticism, but also this applies to just about any kind of cultural criticism you care to point to. On the one hand, reviews seem to be homogenizing, a trend that gets ever more noticeable the more outlets close or get sold to slop factories. I have a lot of sympathy for people who get caught up in the slop market, because like… where else is paying for games criticism right now? But to be clear, even if you have good people manning the factory lines and doing everything possible to make sure the slop is ethically produced and well-written, it’s still… slop, at the end of the day. You’re still extruding slop out of people, and as we can see by the ever-revolving door out of games media, slop is a finite resource.

So that’s one facet of criticism I’m not super into, hopefully for understandable reasons. On the other hand, I’m not sure I can stand behind the so-called “boutique” magazine and outlet model that produces admittedly very premium products that essentially paywall access to talented people’s very good writing behind genuinely prohibitive subscription and shipping costs, either. There’s a book by a critic that I love that I would love to read, and it is on preorder sale right now for $88, after shipping and currency exchange. And this isn’t the deluxe collector’s preorder secret edition! It’s just the regular book! When it was on sale, a similarly excellently-produced collection of games criticism zines was going for $230. Individual sections of that collection were “just” $48. The fucked up part about this is, while it does functionally gatekeep these fantastic sources of games criticism, the alternative seems to be… what, that it just doesn’t get made? That sucks too. Making games criticism into an aesthetically pleasing luxury product results in (some) people getting paid much better than the slop factories, and it allows the outlets to continue putting the stuff out. The cost is access. (Part of me balks at even feeling a little bit conflicted by this model; after all, isn’t this what games and games criticism in general have always wanted? To be considered fine art? Well, fine art isn’t cheap.)

The third facet of criticism that I see that “really grinds my gears” is the facet of criticism that nucleates around “personalities.” How many reader- and viewer-supported, worker-owned media orgs can we sustain? Like, truly? The answer unfortunately cannot be “all of them,” unless like with the boutique mags you’ve got a lot of money to throw around. The more unfortunate answer is that people are going to go with the people they know the best. Before Glenn Greenwald jettisoned his entire reputation into the sun by turning into a MAGA grifter, people subscribed to The Intercept because he worked there, because he was the most vocal voice and public face behind the Snowden Leaks aside from Edward Snowden himself and maybe Laura Poitras. The Intercept also had the benefit of being where Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning documentarian and independent journalist, landed in the wake of his books Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield and a decade of doing work for places like Democracy Now!. This is the whole reason the substack model is even remotely viable: you bring a following with you, and then that following essentially pays your startup costs, and then you grow and get more money from a bigger and bigger following—ideally.

The thing that I dislike about this aside from the economics of it is that there is a transaction cost that comes from turning yourself and your work into a commodity in order to gain a following in the first place. I will be straight the fuck up: if I could simply write, throw my writing into the void, and interact with essentially nobody about it aside from other critics, I would do that in a heartbeat. Unfortunately nobody told me when I started using Twitter in 2009 that I was wiring my brain to require an extremely loud and extremely specifically hostile Skinner box screaming at me at all times in order to function. The fucked up fact is, whether I like it or not, whether my friends like it or not, we are competing like rats for our followers’ time, attention and money every day we do this. And more often than not we’re fighting over a single passed-around $20 bill. So that’s cool.

But “personality-based criticism” isn’t relegated to just websites. There’s an entire Content Ecosystem™ out there that I’ve become decreasingly enamored with as time has passed: video essays, podcasts, and streaming.

Now you can’t really tar these media forms with the same broad brush, but if I had to condense my issues with them into a single point it’s that they make criticism harder to engage with by making it more time consuming to get to. When it comes to podcasts and streams, hearing someone’s take on a game might involve listening to up to several hours of ancillary content depending on the personality, only for that take to merely amount to a kinda-weak “I liked it” or “It wasn’t really hitting for me.” Occasionally, the personality will elaborate and even do so really well, but sometimes you really do just run into an “eh,” and it feels like a bunch of wasted time. Podcasts by and large get away with this either by having conversation timestamps in the episode descriptions or being really easily scrubbable; streams don’t have this benefit (unless the personality bothers archiving their VODs). If you’re watching a livestream of a personality, you can’t just skip forward into the future to listen to their take; you’re sitting there with the rest of the audience, potentially not for the same reasons they are, in anticipation. On this same note, podcasts and streams tend not to have very good transcription in games media, if they have it at all. This means going back later and finding a specific quote of what someone said, unless you’ve already done the work of marking the time-stamp, is wildly difficult. And so, unfortunately, a lot of podcasts and streams for me have kind of been relegated to “second-screen” content, stuff I have on in the background while I’m doing something else, like cleaning my room or filling out a spreadsheet or playing a video game. What really sucks about this is, if somebody whose work I enjoy has gone from primarily doing criticism in a written form to almost exclusively being on a podcast, it feels like I’m missing out on their continuing evolution as a critic.

Video essays sting worse.

When they’re short (≤45m), well-structured, not mere Wikipedia recitals, and have a transcript already or the AI-generated one doesn’t totally suck, a really good video essay can fuck me up sublimely about a given topic. I have been fully rewired by excellent video essays recently. I just don’t know how many more three-to-nine hour videos I have in me across what is left of my steadily-dwindling lifespan. Trying to do the video roundup on a monthly basis last year for Critical Distance frankly almost killed me and took a pretty considerable chunk out of CD’s coffers. So many videos are so long, so full of repeated arguments and backtracking, and so… bereft of just getting to the fucking point that I habitually find myself either blasting through these videos at 2-4x speeds or simply skipping to the “conclusory final hour” – neither of which feels great if the whole point of watching the damn video is ostensibly to engage with criticism! If these videos have transcripts, great; more often than not, they either don’t bother or they just turn the AI transcriber on and hope for the best, leading to similar issues as with podcasts and streaming.

None of this is really the fault of the media format in question, aside from maybe streaming, which does kind of incentivize people to a) do it all the time, b) for long stretches of time, and c) keep reactions “light and breezy,” we’ll call it. You absolutely don’t have to make a podcast that is four hours long and primarily just some bros yapping; I get the appeal of this genre of podcast, but it absolutely isn’t the only kind of podcast that exists. There are interview podcasts, podcasts that are structured around the typical public radio segment limit, podcasts that are laser-focused on close readings of individual pieces of media that deceptively sound like just a chill gab session among friends, podcasts that have associated transcripts with every single episode… all of the things I typically don’t enjoy about games criticism podcasts in 2025 are not set-in-stone tenets of podcasting, nor are they completely ubiquitous within games media. Ditto ultralong and rambling video essays.

As I’ve been writing, I’ve also been trying to think about potential arguments against this rant.^[1]Another argument against this rant that I just thought of as I’m wrapping this up is that “plenty of criticism exists in a long-form format, like books or series.” And this is also … Continue reading One is simply “you control the buttons you press;” for as algorithmically-based as so much of our media is, it’s absolutely the case that we still have some control over what kinds of media we engage with. If I put one afternoon in, I could clean up my YouTube subscription feed and podcast catcher to only show me the clean and tight packages of criticism I want to see pretty much exclusively. The thing is, this rant isn’t just meant to be about what I like and dislike in games criticism in 2025. The forms that criticism takes have an appreciable impact on how that criticism is received and how it is reproduced. Criticism that is malformed, surface-level, mass-produced, created via exploited labor and pushed to every corner of online via search algorithm gaming and SEO bullshit will produce more of the same. Gatekeeping criticism behind very high paywalls with boutique magazines will enforce a class divide between those who can afford to consume – and create – higher-brow criticism, and those who can’t. Trying to build a financial model around personalities might keep criticism more accessible and less affected by slop creation, but unfortunately by necessity shrinks down who gets to do it to those with the most social capital. Otherwise, building a critical apparatus around ephemeral media platforms like YouTube, Twitch and Spotify/Apple Podcasts runs the risk of relegating good, thoughtful criticism to second-screen status.

Again – I want to be so fucking clear: there are individuals in every single one of the forms I just described who I like and who I think are doing good work (sometimes in spite of the form they’re in). I’ve tried not to mention any specific examples of people or outlets beyond the Glenn Greenwald namedrop because I don’t want to make anyone feel bad for doing the work they’re doing in less-than-ideal circumstances (also fuck Glenn Greenwald for a myriad of reasons). If there is to be a conclusion to this rant it’s this:

I read a really good article on Defector tonight. I know, I know; one of those “personality-driven,” worker-owned outlets whose model I broadly don’t think is sustainable. But this article hit me like a brick, and I think everybody should read it. It’s by Dan Sinykin, who according to his bio is “an associate professor of English at Emory University and the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2023) and the co-editor, with Johanna Winant, of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2025).”

The article is called “Close Reading Is For Everyone,” and I want to skip to the end a little bit. He writes:

Meaningfulness doesn’t happen alone. Close reading, as much as it can seem a solitary practice, is social—explicitly in my analysis of Knausgaard, which I wrote as an open letter to a few critic friends who were reading it with me. We published our letters as epistolary criticism. That only foregrounded what is always true: Close reading requires someone you want to persuade, someone whose judgment you care about, and for whom you want your ideas about art and life to matter.

I shared this article in some Discord servers I’m in. Talking specifically about the above passage, someone replied in one server, “reminds me of a professor of mine who likes to say that close reading is more a way of writing than reading.”

I think I am scared that criticism is turning into a distant object, one where the audience is so far removed from the critic that there is no shared ground between us. I think about the arguments friends and colleagues have had with chudlords about what exactly it is that game reviewers actually do – that is, beat a given game without the benefit of a guide, without the benefit of forum posts and reddit threads, without walkthroughs on YouTube or a streamer playing the game with them in simulated real time – and how they’re still called talentless, still disregarded as not actually understanding games or the modern gamer. I know a lot of that is culture war bullshit, but it’s still upsetting. For years – decades – people have been trying to do criticism that remains present, remains connected to real experiences, provides that which any good criticism of any cultural product does: a better, fuller understanding of the work, a way for us to navigate the item in the context of our lives. I think I want criticism to be a collective, playful pursuit, and I think it’s headed in the opposite direction of that.

Earlier this month a game came out, Despelote (Sebastian Valbuena, Julián Cordero/Panic), that produced a lot of really good writing in a pretty short amount of time. One article was at Digital Trends, by Moises Taveras: it detailed beautifully the author’s shared experiences with football and life as the game developers, and how these things shaped him in unexpected-yet-recognizable ways; there’s Nicanor Gordon’s piece on the game, which underscored the importance of football as a social fabric and a story- and meaning-making machine, literally weaving dreams for children and adults across the football-loving world; and most recently there’s Luis Aguasvivas’s article at Gamers With Glasses, which deftly draws a throughline between the kind of chaotic future-denying limbo we find ourselves in and the summer that time stood still in Quito, Equador in 2001 – denoting, importantly, that it is the same line. These pieces don’t mention each other, but it’s hard not to believe they’re not still somehow working in conversation with each other. I want desperately to see this done more explicitly more often. I have no idea if it’s actually possible or even a good idea; but it seems better to me than where we’re at – or where we’re possibly headed.

Anyway feel free to yell at me about this, I don’t think I’m necessarily right about any of it, I just needed to expel it. like phlegm. If you enjoyed, cool. If not, I’m sorry. I can’t be mad, I knew what kind of hornet’s nest I was kicking before I wound up.