There is a lie somewhere in the paragraph above. I’ll give you time and space to see if you can find it.
For a significant portion of people who this year played Kentucky Route Zero through its 2020 release on consoles or PC, you may have trouble spotting it: Kentucky Route Zero’s first two acts as well as its interlude Limits and Demonstrations actually debuted all the way back in 2013, which is when I was first introduced to the game. So people have been making that initial observation about the game for over seven years. And that’s fine! The game’s final act only came out in January of this year, and many who had maybe heard about the game back in 2013 or some other time along the way waited to play it until its final, full release. As well, like I said before, it is just a true thing to say about the game. If you get through all 10 hours or so of the game and don’t realize that, I may wonder if you actually played it at all.
In the games space, as in all spaces, a lot has happened over the course of seven years. Studios have been established, studios have been shut down; likewise with a number of publications dedicated to covering games and the arts culture spaces. Individuals have carved out niches for themselves in games, and many have left for a litany of often very good reasons, from labor issues to compensation to toxicity in gaming communities; though for the scope of this piece I’m only interested in one particular reason.
Along with these sorts of departures from a space comes a harsh inevitability: not just the loss of good people, but the loss of institutional knowledge, and the loss of a sort of cultural locus about how we talk about certain works. In other words, it’s great that more people are talking about Kentucky Route Zero. But it’s a work with an incredible level of depth which practically begs for not just one but several critical appraisals in the way that art theorists and historians have done for great books, poems, paintings, sculptures, cave art, etc. Works evolve with us and with the times; KRZ looks different for me as an American in 2020 than it did as an American in 2013, and that’s both because of this moment in history but also a reflection of the changes, advancements, and declines of me as a person over time.
When I look around at the people who are writing about games in 2020, I see more diversity than ever! The work is far from over to encourage more diversity, but that’s great! But what I don’t see much of is people who have been writing about games for over three years. Three years! That’s not a very long time. And there are two reasons for that: one, of course, is the utter lack of money in it. The amount of time it takes to pitch an idea, wait for a hopeful yes back from the editor, and then actually do the work (of course, doing good work inevitably takes more time) is more often than not simply not worth how much that writer will make as compensation for their labor. It’s often a more worthwhile endeavor to spend that time and energy on some effort which potentially will yield a much larger check; this is a huge part of why so many critics often move onto actual game development, if not into marketing or PR whether in games or not.
The other reason for this sort of slow hemorrhaging of talent from the games criticism space which is more directly relevant to the overall topic of this piece is that I don’t feel like critics with more experience in the field are being intellectually rewarded for their tenure within the space. I’m 26; I’m not exactly old. But I’ve been critically engaged with games for about nine years now; I’ve read a lot of editorial pieces about a litany of topics in games, in particular critiques. So often for me, it feels like we’re just trapped having the same discussions. Yes, KRZ is about what capitalism does to people. It’s also about so many other things, from theater to outsider art to perspective to diorama to experimental music to analog technology to interactive fiction to the history of mining in Kentucky to the very notions of American folklore; and how those things are all connected (or disparate!); the list goes on.
Do you really think Cardboard Computer would have spent as long as they did making the game if all it were about was “man the health care situation in this country sure sucks!!!”? And why do we rarely if ever see any negative critiques about the game? It’s not as if Kentucky Route Zero should be above criticism because it looks vaguely like a Great American Novel. The great episode of the Abnormal Mapping podcast about the game as well as bits of Bullet Points Monthly’s coverage of the game come to mind, but that’s about it; unsurprisingly those critiques both come from people who have been writing about games a lot longer than most. I’m not saying no exceptions to my above prescriptions exist; of course they do! I don’t know everything that everybody has ever said. But I feel we largely aren’t able to move on from the most surface level of subjects with regards to the game and what it’s doing.
I don’t mean to keep going on and on with regards to KRZ as my prime example (full disclosure: I’m friendly with Jake Elliott—the writer of the game—on Twitter, not that that matters much). We need to nurture the critical spaces around games of all shapes and sizes by materially investing in independent publications and podcasts with our dollars, by encouraging discussion of new works, by dissecting critiques (kindly and in a way which encourages people vocalizing opinions that might be construed by others as ‘wrong’ without fear of being demonized—within reason, obviously; I’m not talking about encouraging bigotry, here). In doing so, we’ll better be able to keep good thinkers within the spaces of games criticism and game development for longer stretches of time which will pay significant dividends to the future of how we talk about games. If we don’t, the wider culture of games will never evolve and we’ll be doomed to come to the same surface-level conclusions over and over and over again.
I think the onus is on everybody of all ages and levels of experience to try and make this space stronger and more inviting so as to encourage the retention of good, smart people. For young people, that means trying an older game here and there you’ve heard about but never made the time for and then reading what people have said about it not blogged and made video essays about it 2020 but back in 2010, 2005, 1998, and even further back (yes, work like that does exist!). For more experienced critics, that means making your previous work easily accessible for all to engage with, as well as engaging with what younger people are interested in with an open mind and with snide remarks about how better things used to be kept to zero. For everybody, regardless of demographic, that means actively seeking out works from people of cultures and regions of the world different from yours which provide perspectives and conclusions you likely wouldn’t have been able to come to on your own.
Nobody’s perfect, and nobody has time for everything; certainly not me. I love games, but in the grand scheme of culture, they are still absolutely in the nascent stage of their development, despite how popular they have become. I’m going to try my best to not get complacent, to learn new things about the world through games to fill the ignorant gaps in my brain and utilize that information to hopefully try and kindly enrich this space to help it grow. I hope you’ll do so too.
edit (10/25/2020): Sure enough, not 48 hours after I posted this this piece by lotus—who is becoming a favorite critic of mine—came across my Twitter timeline. It does *exactly* what I'm looking for more of: it looks at Kentucky Route Zero from a completely different angle, is written by a writer of a demographic tragically underrepresented in games crit (they identify as azn & nonbinary on twitter), and is rigorously researched with an eye for shining a light on the perspectives of people lotus feels the game doesn't represent too well if at all. I want more of this sort of unique work which shines a light on the aspects of games that tend to be analyzed less; this came to me just today, but another example of the 'KRZ's about debt, whodathunk!' kind of problem I'm talking about is all the myriad pieces about Supergiant Games' Hades which point out how its narrative progresses forward from loss to loss despite being a roguelike, which is similarly a pretty obvious thing to point out. That lotus' piece on KRZ is negative about the game is incidental; me linking it here is relevant more because it's interests are in the game's portrayal or lack thereof of indigenous and Black peoples' history with this country and specifically Mammoth Cave, a topic I have not seen covered much if at all with regards to critical dissections of Kentucky Route Zero. I will say though that it is refreshing to see open negativity about a game which is so often is regarded as unimpeachably 'good'. Open negativity is a topic I plan to cover in a future post, so look forward to that. Whether or not you agreed with me in this piece, I hope you'll still take the time to read lotus' piece on the game.
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