Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, and Video Game Journalism

This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.

Introduction: Defining Criticism

So here’s a question: Why would anyone care about Oscar Wilde, noted playwright of the 19^th century, and what he had to say about criticism?

The reason is, is because Wilde was a noted criticism advocate during the infancy of print journalism. He was an author and he created an argument, that will be abridged herein, as to why criticism is in and of itself an art form. He was an author who gave left us with reasons and clues as to why criticism is important. And his argument is as timeless as it is germane.

This is a Dialogue that nobody wants to read, very probably – it’s quite dense and the language is a bit outdated; but, if you’re a game journalist you probably should.

In the game press we often get tied up in heated discourse as to whether or not games are art. But often, we don’t stop to think about the validity of our own medium. Game criticism.

If we desire games to have the station of art, we must also recognize that any criticism is subject to the same rigors and processes of criticism as the art that it describes.

Before I begin, I would like to clarify two things.

The first is that in the gaming press we’ve blended the concepts of journalism and criticism. Journalism as a whole includes myriad other styles of writing. News gathering, editorial opinion columns, human interest pieces, and criticism are all important parts of journalism, but criticism as an art form predates journalism by many hundreds of years. (Journalism did not see its rise until the advent of the printing press and, even more so, the subsequent spread of the literacy of the poor.)

This article is specific to the criticism end of the journalistic spectrum, especially with regard to the claims of dilettantism and cavalierism that are often launched against the game journalist by game companies. I, and in fact Wilde, mean(t) to launch back against such claims as both two-faced and hypocritical.

Secondly, Wilde’s Dialogue, which I’ve added many ellipses to in the interest of brevity (because the Dialogue lists a lot of specific works at length), contains, two characters: Gilbert and Ernest. This debate about the validity of criticism is not unique to this time, and Ernest occupies the role of the naysayer during the genesis of the journalistic movement. Gilbert occupies the role of Wilde, the clever logician set in defense.

As a last thought, I have to point out that I am not a published journalist (with regard to the sentiment of payment), and as such some people may think I am speaking out of turn. And that’s cool; part of me feels a bit of trepidation about writing this and posting it.

But I sally onward in the face of such claims. Let’s begin.

Defining Validity

Ernest. But, seriously speaking, what is the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection.

This is a simple concept; if the artist creates, why not leave them to it? Critics, seemingly, only serve to obfuscate the art to the viewer and intimidate the artist.

The answer is simple. Artists are first and foremost accountable to their own interests, especially if they are well known. Critics have no such requirement. Their duty isn’t to the personally vested interest of the artist or his backers.

When a critic assesses a game or a movie or book, that person is as objective as is possible. This doesn’t mean that any critique is wholly objective. Personal biases exist. (In fact, the raging, ongoing debate about whether or not it they do I personally find to be utterly tiring and pointless.) Rather, I mean to say that the critic, if he or she is in any way credible, is externally objective.

The simplest way to express this is to say that the critic is monetarily disinvolved with the financial outcome of any given product. That said, money isn’t the only thing that can slant a review. Any good writing teacher will tell an aspirant that the feedback of his or her peers is to be valued above that of his or her friends or family or, especially, that of his or her own personal judgment.

The critic is just such a peer.

You or I, from the idiotic troll who knows nothing about the game to the well versed expert, are in a position to more accurately assign meritorious measure than those who were involved in the creation of the piece simply because of their implicit interest.

I don’t mean to equate the guy who flames a forum to the guy with the great points. But on some fundamental they have more in common than they do with the developer or the marketer. Disinvolvement.

Personally, I would much rather listen to a troll, or hell the vaunted “expertise” of my 55 year old mother, than have Denis Dyack tell me why Too Human is good on 1up Yours. At that point, he’s just trying to sell me something.

Defining Expertise and Ingnorance

Ernest. Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work? What can they know about it? If a man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . .

Gilbert. And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked.

In the dialogue, Gilbert is being ironic with regard to both his response and Ernest’s original question. Ernest is expressing what could either be the naiveté of the artist, or, more maliciously, the artist’s arrogance: the idea that any piece of work cannot be examined by someone who could not have created it.

This is a common claim of the developer: that the critic doesn’t understand the mechanical structure of the piece, or the man hours spent, and is therefore in no position to criticize it. This drives me up a fucking wall.

Such a claim serves only to insult the intelligence of the critic, which, of course, I take exception to.

But sure, I’ll play along.

Critics know nothing about the programming or the structuring that goes into making a game. Hell, they’re right. I don’t know how to program a game. And in the criticism community this is generally prima facie. Most critics haven’t made games.

But, when developers say this, they are forgetting one important fact. Critics are certainly guides, but they aren’t the ultimate tastemakers of any art form. There is an entire group of people that they implicitly mialign when they lob such a weak retort. Their audience.

Simply stated, if one says that a critic’s opinion is invalid due to their ignorance as to the processes of making a game, it is also implicitly stated that the larger audience’s opinion shares the same qualities: invalidity and stupidity.

The target audience (to use marketer-speak) doesn’t know how to make a game either. And here’s the hypocrisy; no developer would say the same things they do about their critics as they would their audience.

Why not? Well, that would just be bad business.

If developers want to be consistent in their argument, they should only make games for each other because, apparently, they are the only people who could possibly fathom understanding them.

As for Ernest’s second claim, that any work that is clear should not need review, I leave it to Wilde.

Gilbert cleverly refutes this by presenting the most austere of examples. A work that is purposefully weird or oblique. What Gilbert means to say here is that, regardless of intention, all works are, on some fundamental level, inscrutable and thusly subject to review. A work that seems obvious isn’t necessarily so obvious when taken in account of the infinitude of possible viewership.

Defining Critical Thinking

Gilbert. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. But let us return to the particular point at issue. What was it you said?

Ernest. Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no art-critics.

(…)

Ernest. (…) The Greeks had no art-critics…

(…)

Gilbert. (…) But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.

Ernest. Really?

Gilbert. Yes, a nation of art-critics.

(…)

Gilbert. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they invented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what is our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And, this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of criticism that the world has ever seen.

Here Wilde is driving at something very profound. That the legacy of the Greek mindset is everything we have today. The greatest gift of post-Socratic philosophy is the ability to imagine an argument for or against anything.

While John Dewey may have brought the term “critical thinking” into the educational lexicon, it is most certainly true that the Greeks invented it.

It right there in The Trial and Death of Socrates:

“It is true that I encourage my students to question everything, and that I teach them methods I use myself. I do this not to make the disloyal to Athens, but to make them think. In order to find wisdom and truth they must question. Do the judges see the search for truth as a corrupting influence?”

Whilst the Greek state had no formal concept of the “art-critic,” this lack is irrelevant. In the wake of Socrates, they had, by their very nature, a large group of people who were trained of such capacities.

Which brings me back to John Dewey, arguably the father of the modern western education modality, a model that has largely become the standard in most developed countries.

Finding connections between the Greeks, Dewey, and critical thinking on the web proved such an easy task that I cannot list them all. Scholarly articles on numerous databases across the Internet list Socrates as a key influence on the writings of John Dewey, and by extension, the modern educational approach.

Just try here, here, and here.

I will cherry pick one quote however. It is from a collective on critical thinking written by Jeris Folk Cassel and Robert James Congleton :

“…the term ‘critical thinking’ has become prevalent in philosophy, education, and psychology to the extent that it is considered a buzzword. The concept itself is not new. It dates back to Socrates in ancient Greece and has been a goal of education reformers throughout history. Twentieth century efforts at integrating critical thinking into the forefront of education can be found in the writing of John Dewey.”

So, what is the point of all of this?

It is my argument that most people who would interact with a video game are possessed of the requisite knowledge to analyze that experience.

First of all, since 1970 and according to the Human Development Index (HDI), the global illiteracy rate has been halved. And, more importantly, in more modern, developed countries – countries with gamers – the average literacy rate, according to the HDI, is close to 99%.

What does this tell us about the sophistication of gamers? Everything.

From Socrates, all the way down through Dewey, globalized education has yielded a populous that is capable of both thinking critically and analyzing appropriately. Does this make every person a critic in the formal sense? Of course not.

What it does mean is that, by and large, those people who prize their own education do have the faculties necessary to become a critic.

In this sense, when developers attack critics for their lack of knowledge, they not only offend their critics and their audience. Moreover, they offend anyone who has ever received, and been invested in, their own personal quest for truth and education.

Defining Legacy

Gilbert. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Ernest. I should have said that great artists work unconsciously, that they were ‘wiser than they knew, ‘as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere’.

Gilbert. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. (…) Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one.

This portion of the dialogue is especially revealing, and serves to legitimize us. As my article expands, I use the term “us” very loosely. Be it Bitmobbers, Internet trolls, non-gamers, or more official game journalists, in Wilde’s view the creator bears no weight on history. It is our privilege as journalists, and more generally as consumers, to record, and in fact recreate, history as we see fit.

The immediate sales of a game are the domicile of advertisers and marketers.

The legacy of any given game is ours.

I don’t mean to puff myself up here, and I don’t mean to brag; for evidence, just look at the Dreamcast retrospective that has been the centerpiece of this site for the last little while.

Next year I’m sure there will be similar retrospectives about the Playstation 2, but I do not think that such features will have the bevy of furious and passionate devotees that the Dreamcast enjoys. Certainly, the PS2 deserves it’s place as a wonderful system to play games on, but that is where it stops.

The Dreamcast exists more as a movement now, than an actual game system. Gamers who didn’t own it are aware of it despite its short lifespan. This because we, as gamers, have decided that it should not go forgotten.

Extrapolate that even further and one hundred years from now people might not even know what a Dreamcast or a PS2 is. What they will remember, from our current time, is more likely to be specific.

Specific titles like Grand Theft Auto will serve as windows into our current lifestyles and humor, where as titles like Ico and Flower will be demonstrative of the artistic capacities of our global culture in this young medium. Sales be damned.

Artistic treasures aren’t remembered by authors or advertisers. They are remembered by the critics, and, as a paramount entity, the fans.

Defining The Critic as an Artist

Gilbert. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.

Ernest. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, surely, the higher you place the creative artist, the lower must the critic rank.

Gilbert. Why so?

Ernest. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich music, a dim shadow of clear-outlined form…

Ernest. But is Criticism really a creative art?

Gilbert. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.

Now that I’ve thrown out all of the wrecking balls that I have against developers and marketers, and what their statements about critics imply about everyone, I’ll pull it back to the more formal discussion of critique.

And so, this is a bit of an impasse in which I partially diverge from Wilde – which may seem an odd choice to conclude with, but give me a second.

For some reason Wilde, an author and master is his own right, goes out of his way to say that criticism is higher than art in his very own medium.

As a critic this is a nice sentiment, but, one that I feel is a bit foolish. Critique versus art, art versus critique, it’s not a fucking race.

His logic makes sense. He is saying that critical faculties go into the creation of art, and therefore the critical precedes the artistic. This is sound logic, and I don’t disagree. What I do is disagree with is that an antecedent relation with criticism somehow diminishes the art. What he misses is that yes, certainly critical consideration goes into art, but without art, the critic has nothing, precisely because he cannot, as Ernest says, create it.

The reason I chose this passage is because there is something beautifully explicated here:

“[Criticism] works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry?”

And this is why every journalist should read Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist. I’ve seen some amazing things on this website, and other places. New Games Journalism has its promises of a more personal and telling manner of relation. Sites like Blogspot and WordPress promise us an ongoing discourse that makes the boundaries of criticism hazy. Wilde’s Dialogue only reinforces these ideas.

And this haziness of criticism is to our boon. Critique isn’t just erudition – though that can be important. Without the multitude of voices that this egalitarian approach to criticism allows us, without us all being critics, we would never see the wonderful new wrinkles toward video game critique that Bow Nigger, A Life Well Wasted, and, of course Bitmob have provided us. It’s individual, and that’s the key.

This is what makes the critic an artist.

As Wilde says, “That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul.”

~James DeRosa, as read on The Sophist, and as heard on Sophist Radio