Game Design Advance

There are a couple of interesting things happening in New York City soon:

Frank Lantz, the founder of Game Design Advance, among other things, is giving a talk this Friday in Tribeca. This is a great opportunity in that Frank rarely gives long, solo talks, especially on some of the more esoteric things that go on in his head. The talk starts at 8pm this Friday, March 20th; tickets are $10 and can be ordered online or purchased at the door.  More info is here:

Frank Lantz – How Games Mean

Another upcoming event is The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s first triennial exhibition, which is going to feature Mark Essen’s brilliant game Flywrench. I’ve sung my praises for the game and am happy that it’s getting some great exposure. The exhibition is featuring a range of artists and will be mounted sometime next month. You can read about the event in The New York Times here:

Art of the Computer Generation

I’ll post an update when a start date gets pinned down.

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Where is ‘games criticism’?

This is a bigger question than it seems at first, with a few different ways it could be posed. With the closing of Electronic Gaming Monthly and the inevitable decline of its print brethren, the question could be about whether authoritative opinion on games is moving permanently from the analog to the digital world; or, as it becomes more and more obvious that the audience for video games is much larger and diverse than previously envisioned, the question becomes much more plaintive: “where is a voice to tell me what games I’ll like?” The proliferation of game-focused bloggers with a specialty in serving specific readerships rather than large ones turns this question into something a little more existential: games criticism is now everywhere, and as a result is it nowhere?

Still another way of asking this question is from the perspective that game criticism is always happening, and as a subject is much larger than the various forms it has taken, is taking, and will take in the future. The question could pre-suppose that all the work that’s being done right now exists within a history that stretches back to maybe not the first game ever made, but certainly the second. After all, what is creation but something of a critique of the past? This implies that perhaps the question posed is really a shortening of the real question at hand:

Where is games criticism right now?

I’ve tried to summarize here what I think are the dominant approaches to game criticism at the present moment. I refer to these approaches as ‘modes’ because we tend to shift between them, often without realizing. This effort is in no way meant to trivialize the work of any individual critic, but simply to give context. The easier it is for us as a critical community to see where we’ve been and identify where we are now, the easier it is to think about where we are going.

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