I think we're all tired
Let me tell you, I don't really care about social media discussions about specific games. I am tired of them, very, very tired.
I think it started around 2019 or so, when I noticed how conversations around games started to fall into a very specific and predictable pattern. A game comes out and the entire critical ecosystem begins to circle around that particular title. You have reviews, critiques of the reviews, critiques of the the critiques and then larger meta-level discussions around the nature of games criticism and how the conversation around THE GAME shows where we are.
Then the next game comes out and it all repeats again, but because these discussions always happen in isolation, they don't create any lasting knowledge. In fact, it feels like with each repetition we forget a little bit more.
I personally am at a point, where seeing a game become the focus of this circular critical discussion makes me completely disinterested in it. It is just exhausting to watch the wave of takes, regardless of quality, wash past you over and over again, while knowing that nothing will come of it and that underneath those takes there are conversations to be had that will never happen.
I wonder if I'm not alone with this. Maybe one reason the discussions get more and more hostile with each new cycle is because more and more people are tired of this endless churning of empty opinions.
I think this unproductive cycle of discussions is another expression of the Deadzone that exists within industrial videogames. In the case of games criticism, it was created and is still maintained by the specific, broken media landscape we exist in, but it is also something that exists within us. I feel a lot of people who discuss videogames critically can't even imagine a different approach to it than what we have right now.
It wasn't a conscious decision of mine, but I think the reason why I started to actually think about what "Evil Game Design" could be, was an attempt of mine to create something that could serve as a different approach to how you could look at, and create videogames. Fact is that I've been deeply unhappy with the commonly accepted approaches to how games were discussed and what they were allowed to be for a very long time, but I couldn't shake the notion that it was I who had to adjust my ideas around those conventions. But you cannot change things that are broken, by repeating the same actions that caused them to break in the first place.
I'm not saying this, because I want everyone to become evil game designers and evil game critics (though "Evil Game Critic" does sound cool). However, I still want to share it, because even though it's silly and might not even work, it does show that it's possible to approach this subject from a different direction.
I don't have a lot of optimism in me, even on my best days, and I am very exhausted and scared of the future. However, I will not let go of the belief that things could be different, could be better than what we have right now. It is frustrating to see talented people being churned into exhaustion by this neverending cycle of fruitless discussions, and I want for us all that our work can exist in a world, where it means more than just how much social media engagement it created.