IRL, I‘m just your garden-variety university student and a notoriously chill guy. I love learning and art above most things, always have. You could say this diverse array of interests has influenced my approach to videogame criticism: while many believe videogames to be some sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, I think compared to other art forms, they aren’t any more or any less special. That might sound harsh, but nothing is harsher than the aesthetic demotion videogames suffer under the exceptionalist perspective.

Other than that, I'm passionate about… way too many things. In no particular order, here are a few: learning Japanese (a long-term project I’m very consistent about), subcultural fashion (especially J-fashion subcultures), literary criticism (a significant amount of the most obstinate videogame discourse topics precede Tennis for Two, believe it or not), web aesthetics (I have this pretty big book that barely fits in my bookshelf called The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology), and weird, obscure, avant-garde videogames (last time I checked, they called them “altgames”—at any rate, not to be confused with "indies"). Nice to meet you!

Now, for those who are new and don't know what to expect from my writing, I thought it would be a good idea to write down a list of videogame crit opinions to get us on the same page about my beliefs. I don't have all the answers, so I'm more than happy to have productive discussions about them. I will add more as I remember/come up with them.

1. This distinction between reviews and cultural analysis, or between reviews and videoessays, or between reviews and [insert sophisticated, nuanced, subjective, non-evaluative form of videogame criticism]—I never got it, though not for a lack of trying. When I was first introduced to the idea of videogame criticism beyond the scope of graphics, gameplay, and raw fun (and back when this ostensibly rebellious attitude towards those concepts presented any novelty to me), I was fully sold on the project of “cultural videogame critique”. Unfortunately, after a fair share of encounters with executions of this ideal, I came to realize this high-brow distancing from reviews was an empty, self-congratulatory promise.
   
   Isn't it convenient, monolithically projecting onto reviews certain attributes (hyper-consumerist, obsessed with objectivity, socioculturally shortsighted, techno-utopian) in order to flatter one's favored kind of writing upon comparison? And by means of the compartmentalizing required to do so, the avoidance of any interrogation of the inconspicuous presence of those same traits in the cultural analysis we so adore instead—isn’t that convenient as well? Really, how could anyone, myself included, be surprised when people who affirm themselves through the sweeping devaluation of an entire field they have spent little to no intellectual curiosity on produce writing so intellectually underwhelming?
   
   In other words: we could judge reviews as a whole based on what hype-fueled mainstream gaming outlets publish, or cultural analysis as a whole based on desperate pleas for cultural validation by means of stilted, insubstantial connections with high culture, or film as a whole based on whatever Marvel Studios churns out these days, but why should we?
2. Regarding the topic of “technical limitations”, let’s think about this obvious truth: say, twenty or thirty years ago, any given videogame looked one way, but it was entirely possible for it to have looked a different way. This is easily verifiable by taking a look at a bunch of its contemporaries, all of them created by different people under different circumstances, and visually distinguishable from one another (arguably, more so than recent AAAs). “Old” is not a cohesive aesthetic category. The fog in Silent Hill 2 or Shadow of the Colossus didn’t one day appear like a weed their creators were unequipped to pull out from their code at the risk of unraveling the whole thing—as a matter of fact, someone had to put it in there. Tank controls do not represent an underdeveloped stage towards modern standardized control systems: one of them is, and the other will inevitably become, a former fashion of a previous time. Even so (partly because of it), both of these schemes are poetic devices with unavoidable capacity for meaning.
   
   Remakes and remasters' raison d'etre is accessibility: not in the sense of “ease of access” (a complex and multifaceted project), but in the sense of “familiar, comfortable; like other popular modern games”. And when these popular modern games become old and unfamiliar, a lucky few will get their own remakes, too. “Tank controls have aged poorly, haven't they? Just take them out, it’s a quality of life improvement that doesn’t alter the integrity of the original,” says the same person who proclaims videogames to be art. But they have it coming: the most timeless-masterpiece-gold-standard videogame of our day is due its obsolescence narrative sooner or later. And when that happens, do try to remind them, for your own amusement if nothing else—that is, if you can google it without exclusively getting results about its remake.