I'm a long-time gamer and I've always loved games media and criticism (like Polygon, MinnMax, Pew Pew Bang, Jacob Geller etc). I've recently started a little blog to practice writing about games, but I find that when I try to write about what I think is cool about them, I always end up just saying some variation of "It's very interesting and fun!"
My question to you, mother, is how do I learn to write about games more thoughtfully?
Critics make a career out of trying to understand culture, and some of them truly have a knack for it. But it's also really okay to just write about games you love on your blog or YouTube channel. If you want to take it a step further in terms of the points you're making beyond "it's good" or "it's bad," though, you've gotta dive into what the piece of media is saying to you, what you're saying back to it, and what you want to take from that experience and tell to your audience.
A great way to narrow the focus of your idea and make sure your piece has a salient point beyond just stating whether you like or dislike the work in question would be to imagine how you would pitch the story to a publication. This pitch would be a sort of abstract for the piece, no longer than a few sentences, that you come up with before you sit down to actually write out your full idea.
If it feels like you need to write much more than a short paragraph to explain the crux of the piece, you might need to take some more notes, do some more research, or even do some interviews, to hone in on your idea. On the other hand, if you feel like you can't write more than one sentence (or one sentence rephrased three times), you might have more of a topic than a story idea. Sometimes that means you need to dive back into the game and look deeper, and sometimes it means that you can just write, say, 140 characters rather than 1,000 words. Maybe as an exercise, you could try writing a faux pitch for another writer's piece you've already read and enjoyed, reverse engineering the process for writing you'd like to emulate.
That brings me to the oldest and tiredest and truest writing advice, which is to just read more. Read voraciously and read things you wouldn't normally read. Read people who are similar to you and people who are not. Jot down writers whose names you like and follow their work. Read work from writers you don't understand or those you dislike, and make note of what you dislike about it. Challenge your own biases and look up words or concepts you don't recognize. Read criticism about things that are not games, too!
You may have had some past experience with writing media criticism in a school setting. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that academia is the only or preferred way into criticism. Academia can at times seem so insulated from the context of the real world that the language you learn might be moot outside of the classroom. Your opinions about the media you consume matter whether or not you know what a bildungsroman is. Those opinions turn into an actual piece of criticism when synthesis, analysis, and your own personal expertise come in — taking multiple pieces of information, understanding them in context with one another, and using those truths to draw a separate conclusion about the media at hand. It's the stuff of my dreams!
I have always enjoyed analyzing literature, films, games, and really any art, and I've been steeped in that critical space for at least 15 years. That means I have the blessing-curse that many critics do, which is that I can't turn my analytical brain off even when I'm consuming media for pleasure or just information-seeking. It annoys the shit out of my family and sometimes it annoys the shit out of me. This might happen to you, too, if you really get into analyzing media in this way.
But it's not for everyone, and it shouldn't be. Regardless of what you do with your writing and whether it is poignant and incisive or just a social media post about a game you're enjoying, you shouldn't stop writing. The people who write criticism professionally are not in charge of what you think about the games you're playing. Instead, it's our job to help you understand why games make players feel or think certain things, or peel back the outer layer to show you how they accomplish that.
Managing editor Zoë Hannah has a decade of experience writing, reporting, and editing. She's previously served as games editor at Vox Media's Polygon.com and deputy editor of reviews at Hearst Magazines.
