It’s been a grim month for the field of criticism: the New York Times reassigned veteran critics, WaPo’s took a buyout, Vanity Fair elected to eliminate reviews, and Associated Press did the same with its book reviews. It’s beginning to look like curtains for criticism—at least of the traditional sort—but do not conflate the mercurial winds of economic change with a lack of need. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
This time around we’re joined by our former Kotaku colleague Harper Jay for a discussion of criticism’s role in a world that seems determined to reject it—or at least cast it out of mainstream publications, as well as many video game publications. What does it mean for institutions to cede this ground to fandoms and social media? What do we lose when we cease to respect the expertise that goes into well-considered critical work—or even eliminate the idea of “critic” as a legitimate role or job altogether?
Then we talk about the news of the week: Unionized workers at Arkane, a Microsoft-owned studio, released a statement decrying the company’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—a subject that hits close to home for Harper, who until very recently worked at Double Fine, another Microsoft studio. Finally, Gita explains why Eevee is the best Pokémon design (it’s a prism through which to view the infinite possibilities of childhood, obviously).
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can hire so many in-house critics that we’ll have to build a whole other house just for them.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: We’ve been talking a lot about fandom and the way people discuss things online – and the flattening of a whole bunch of different ideas that could be considered attempts at criticism, but mostly turn into arguments or policing people for not demonstrating sufficient ideological purity or whatever. And then we have publications ceding that ground and effectively saying that the traditional notion of a critic is something they’re no longer interested in. As a result, you could potentially say that the idea of being a career critic is going away, or becoming something you can only do on YouTube or whatever. What are your feelings on that dynamic shift?
Harper: It’s wrong. It’s wrong in the sense that anybody can call themselves a critic in the same way that anybody can say that they’re a journalist. The answer is: No you fucking aren’t. That’s a mean thing to say, and it’s not a question of their intentions; it’s a question of their ability. Which is not a popular sentiment to share, but the reason that newspapers have people who are critics is because it is a talent you develop just like anything else. It’s just like with people who say “I’m a journalist” and then just put “BREAKING” in front of all their tweets, that’s not the same thing as being a reporter. There are processes, there’s a body of knowledge that you have, there’s a tradition that you are connected to, there are standards that you hold yourself to.
It’s cool, and it’s often very good, that someone can jump on YouTube and make two hours of something that is incredibly personal and moving, and it’s right there; in some ways, there’s no barrier to entry. Anyone can do it. But also, the reason that you have positions at outlets or newspapers – and the reason why getting rid of them is bad – is because you’re ceding that process to people who do not have experience or training or standards.
Gita: When I was working at Vice, I shifted pretty hard into criticism in a form I really enjoy—I wrote the Joss Whedon thing and the Aaron Sorkin thing—and I literally could not have written those things without [editor] Tim Marchman.
Harper: I miss him.
Gita: I was texting him the other day, and it made me miss him a lot—him and his weird tinned fish obsession.
He gave me a lot of tools and provided me with things to read. He told me ways to approach these questions that I was trying to answer that I couldn’t have found on my own. Even just the process of getting on the phone with him and being like “I’m thinking X, Y, Z,” and he was like “Have you tried A, B, C,” those things helped me get my wheels turning in ways that I could not have done without him.
Criticism for me is often a collaborative process, even if I’m just getting up and going to my husband in the other room and saying, “I can’t figure out how to do this transition from one paragraph to the other. Can you help me understand what I’m trying to say here?” I know I could not be someone who gets on YouTube and talks for three hours about a movie. I need an editor. I need someone to help put guardrails on my arguments so I don’t fly off into random tangents.
There are people on YouTube who I think do a great job at criticism. I just watched a seven-hour video about Midsommar and all the symbolism in it, and the person who made the video, Novum, went so far as to reach out to actors on the film and production designers —so a really, really robust attempt to actually look at the work and think about meaning and how these symbols come together and create new meanings.
That’s possible [to do in the YouTube ecosystem]. But you can see and tell that this person comes from a tradition of talking and thinking about art in that way. And that kind of video is surrounded by other videos that are just like “Midsommar Ending Explained.”
Nathan: You could even say those types of videos are the majority now. That’s the main form of discourse around these types of media, whether we’re talking games, TV, film, or whatever else, and then as an outlier you have people digging into something and trying to talk specifically about themes and the ideas a work is trying to explore – which I think is often the point when an artist creates something. But people are getting hung up on “Oh, there’s a plot hole here.”
Gita: Or literally even dumber, [a lot of videos] are just about what happened. “What was the sequence of events I just watched?” You can use your own brain to figure that out!
Nathan: It’s the plot section of a Wikipedia page.
Gita: You can see the lack of facility here. And of course now a lot of those “Blah blah blah ending explained” videos are AI slop. AI voiceover and ChatGPT script put together with algorithmic editing of random clips from the film. That is worrying to me, because it’s not just about lack of media literacy—although I know that’s a popular conversation topic these days. It’s about a lack of curiosity. Not wanting to do the thinking yourself, but wanting something else to do the thinking for you—it is the thing that really concerns me about widespread use of ChatGPT.
