A review by nickfourtimes
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games by J. Robert Lennon, Carmen Maria Machado

emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

1) [Introduction]

"...an anthology that holds space for writers who are compulsive gamers, former gamers, parents of gamers, and game writers. Reluctant gamers and avid gamers and people who wouldn't call themselves gamers at all. This book—the first of its kind, as far as I and my coeditor can tell—has more room inside it than you'd expect. What a pleasure and a gift to be at its helm." [A bold claim!!]

2) ["This Kind of Animal," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah]

"You look at your sisters weeping, your mother dry-eyed.

Empathy: 'You couldn't have been different. You are all you knew.'

Suggestion: 'You could have been anything. There's so many ways to be.'

Logic: 'What you are is what you are.'

Inland Empire: 'Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.'

To his body, as a way to speak to him, you say, 'I love you and I wish you were here.'

Inland Empire: 'I love you and where I am now, love is all that's left.'

3) [Ibid.]

"I'm not here to tell you to play the game. I'm here to say that Disco Elysium is a magnificent literary experience. Literary is a slippery and sometimes problematic word, but in this context I mean: via the precise use of language, it changes the reader. It makes you grow, gives you a new way of looking at the world, which is a mirror of all of us together, and it asks you really, truly, honestly, Who are you? Who are your dead? And gives you the space to try to answer."

4) ["Staying with the Trouble," Octavia Bright]

"We know the world that made the story of Leisure Suit Larry all too well, but how do we stay with the trouble it presents? By not letting it slip into the soothing fog of nostalgia, or under cover of the so-called harmless joke? By facing the fact that the trouble at the heart of the story it tells, and the world that story then goes on to make, is that masculinity is something a person can win or lose at? If, as Haraway argues, 'it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,' then it also matters what games game games."

5) ["The Cocoon," Ander Monson]

"I remember the sudden jump scares, too, as you came out of an airlock or around a corner and anything could be there. It was cheap but effective: more visceral than you'd think, considering this was 1994. Video was ascendant, not games, which of course still came on cartridges. My friends and I consumed a ton of both, often in whoever's apartment had the system we wanted to use. It was walking distance to downtown, I think. Someone or someone's brother worked at Very Video in Hancock, across the bridge, and was allowed to bring home for the weekend whatever systems they hadn't rented, one of which was this new one: the Atari Jaguar."

6) [Ibid.]

"Playing as a human becomes a game of collection. Shotgun rounds collected. Food collected. Medkit collected. Pulse Rifle rounds collected. Security card #03 collected. Collecting is central to many of my passions: I collect for pleasure. But here you collect to survive. The Aliens collect for reproduction only. The Predator collects too. It keeps skulls as trophies. It seems to be having the most fun, which is probably why it's most fun to play as it. After all, it doesn't have to be here. This isn't about survival. It's about sport.

What is fun is the Alien area, with its labial doorways, its green-and-black palette, its gooey strands of whatever, its weird reptilian wall textures. For an early game, the design is well done. It's weird enough to convey the alienness. The Predator area is similarly distinctive, if a little less so on account of there being less Predator decor on offer to work with from the movies. Its yellow-and-brown tie-dye-looking textures gives the impression of being inside some kind of psychedelic animal ship or a college dorm room circa 1995."

7) ["Ninjas and Foxes," Alexander Chee]

"The draw to play is still there. I see games now that interest me, like Ghost of Tsushima, but I'm almost an old man now, and I'm getting along fine without them. More importantly, I feel like the main character in my life now. I don't need the game to offer me the cheap alternative.

As I think about what I've learned about the impulse to play in a world that is like the world I want but not that world, I ask myself: Why would I want to be a samurai, or a ninja, or a martial arts legend, in America now? And on whose terms? Is there something about being in this country that makes me long for that? My late father actually was a martial artist, and I think of the amused disgust he would feel at seeing me play this game from the afterlife, though it is maybe even the case that playing these games was and is a way of missing him. It may also be there is still something I need to figure out this way, and in the end, that is how I will think of it: each game just another mask to wear in search of the truth, whatever that truth might be. One truth might be this: it may be that now I could play a game like that just for the fun of it. At last."

8) ["No Traces," Stephen Sexton]

"The work of poetry, which often stretches into the early hours, is play. When it's going well, I feel outside myself, strange to myself, outside the usual flow of time. I don't know how to get there, but for the briefest time, I sense that circuit—subject and object, writer and reader, player and icon—complete itself through me. It's like catching your reflection in the glass of your front door as you reach for the handle, either leaving or coming home—you can't, for the moment, tell which."

9) ["We're More Ghosts Than People," Hanif Abdurraqib]

"The building where I worked as a debt collector in the 2000s looked like it could have been a portal to anywhere. Like anything could have been inside of it. This is how all the debt collection buildings looked in Columbus, Ohio. Large, gray, nondescript slabs. Brick sometimes, if you were lucky. All of them on the outskirts of the city, nudging up against a suburb's borders but never in the suburb. Places where good people went to do bad work because they had to survive.

I needed a job. I had, by that point, accumulated a small criminal record, with a larger one to come. I had to find a place where I could build some form of legitimacy, and no one else would hire me. Debt collection companies would take anyone. There was a boom in the industry. This was right after the early-2000s recession but before the more robust late-2000s recession. Broadly, this meant that there were more people in dire straits than there had been before. Misery as a gateway to opportunity; you might even call it the American Dream."