CRITICAL HITS: Writers Playing Video Games, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado
At their best, video games can offer a path through difficulty, in both reality and fiction. In Ka Vang’s short story “Ms. Pac-Man Ruined My Gang Life,” a Hmong teenager escapes domestic trouble in an arcade; in Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” an Afghan American boy grows “oddly immune” to the dissonance of shooting video-game targets who resemble his father; in Raven Leilani’s novel “Luster,” Edie and Akila break bread in Overcooked after the police attempt to break their spirits.
More concerned with feeling than representation, the video game — no more or less racist, violent, sexist, extractive, colonialist, diverse or dumb than any form of entertainment that preceded it — is among the most popular pleasures of the 21st century. Compiled by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado, “Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games” is an anthology of admiration for the medium by both household names and newcomers, tracking a paradigm shift decades in the making, since the global release of the first PlayStation in 1995. In the generation since, the video game has established itself as a universal accompaniment to social life.
Some entries take more tactical approaches to the craft, mechanics and business of gaming. In the graphic essay “Video Game Boss,” the cartoonist MariNaomi reflects on her experience working for a misogynistic game-production company in the 2000s. Octavia Bright bonds with the “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” author Gabrielle Zevin over their childhood memories of the “creepy” computer program Leisure Suit Larry, reproducing its multiple-choice questions, its “profoundly lonely” projection of American masculinity, on the page.
For all their variety, these multiple perspectives on gameplay and art share a yearning for intimacy, for the kind of companionship built and sustained in game worlds against a real world that is constantly crumbling. “Here’s the beautiful separation games promise,” Larissa Pham writes in one of the strongest essays in the book. “You can become someone, even grow to love someone, a character that’s both the result of your efforts and not yourself.”
In every essay, there is kinship, even love — among players, characters, family members, romantic partners, friends, strangers. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah considers grief through the lens of Disco Elysium, which “asks you, the player, to discover just what kind of beast you are.” Elissa Washuta writes about illness and the summer she spent in the world of The Last of Us, “playing as a survivor who cannot let their emotions get the best of them.” Playing Final Fantasy VI when he was 11, Keith S. Wilson learned about “spiritualism and nature’s fragility” under racial capitalism, and Hanif Abdurraqib came to a new understanding of heaven through Red Dead Redemption in 2019. And who would have thought Ninja Gaiden Black’s Caucasian-featured clan leader Ryu Hayabusa could hold Alexander Chee in a button-mashing rapture in which he revisits his childhood trauma?
Being a gamer is not a cost of entry into “Critical Hits,” which emerges as a fresh deviation from stale debates about ludology, or the status of games as art, or the status of writing about games as some trite negligibility. Here instead is an array of arguments for how games structure our behavior and perception of the world around us. Lennon and Machado have emboldened a discourse on how we are learning to live among games in thought and deed, at the very least, one player at a time.
CRITICAL HITS: Writers Playing Video Games | Edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado | Graywolf | 235 pp. | Paperback, $18
