…I have come to realise all too swiftly that my arguments are a touch off topic, picking up some the 2006 article and running with it, and going for the throat concerning talented critique in VGs.

Still, the final note you made about what you’re setting out to do is noble enough, but again suggests that you are planning to shoehorn videogame critique into a familiar format you’ve already established with film and literature.

Finally, I bow out!

Firstly, Mr Scalzi’s 2006 article concerning criticism of the video game genre, or a lack of it, immediately highlights an assumption that goes a long way to answering both itself and some of the comments above.

In short, the real reason I suspect that video game critique has not received more attention is that the majority of critics (including the two of you, at least the way I’m reading your articles) are trying to shoe-horn the concept of ‘video games’ into a rating system you’ve crafted within other media.

I don’t expect a (good) sports commentator to start discussing the touching story of friendship between two members of a football team. To be that much more blunt, a food critic does not talk about the musicality of the knife scratching his plate. They not only stick to what they are supremely knowledgeable, but they understand that a unique approach is needed to form the review in the first place.

A great deal of the VG reviewers I know or have read are either literary or film critics who do the odd game review on the side or nerds who don’t write too well. But there’s no stigma attached to ‘nerd’ – I expect to Empire to provide me with the views of film nerds and bookslut to proffer me with, well, you get the idea. Very occasionally a good writer also happens to be a game nerd, and then Gabe and Tycho happens.

Generally though, a well-meaning film critic surmises that, hey – I know my plots, I know effects and music. Ergo, I am also a game reviewer.

Scali said “I think the first truly notable interactive video game narrative presentation was Myst.” He is talking about the relatively short amount of time the industry has had to be criticised as it were, but why does narrative presentation suddenly make something critique-worthy?

“…reviews are aimed at telling readers whether a game’s play is worth shelling out $50 for, and not about the cultural and aesthetic context of the game and why it is significant in that regard.”

And so on. What is the aesthetic context of a high tackle in American Football, and does that make a sports critique any less important? It opens up an argument on the nature of critique itself. Do film critics tell me if the it’s worth shelling out £7.50 to see a movie in the cinema? Well, yeah, they kinda do.

To see a debate of the game’s mechanics as a less-important thing, as merely a ‘review’, is to miss the point of video games in the first place. The real reason that neither of you have come across anyone you would see as a Lester Bangs in the world of video games is simply that you are not truly a part of the world of video games. If you had read the monthly columns in Edge you would be adding salt to taste to your hats and stuffing them down your mouths.

“The real significant critics will take for granted that the medium is significant. They won’t have to worry about justifying it.”

Close: the real significant critics are already loved – they’re simply not a part of your world, and you won’t know about them anymore than a hardcore gamer with a mild interest in music will know who Lester Bangs is.

This has started reading pretty angry, so I will leave it there. It’s not intended in such a way, it’s more that I will go out on a limb and say that neither of you have bothered to read any of the print magazines and journals within the industry. McCalmont mentions Brooker, but only in the context of him now having ‘made it’ in the Guardian (and I guess that therefore makes him a ‘real’ critic in your eyes, right?)

Something smacks ever so slightly of arrogance.

I think that there are two things here.

Firstly, you seem to really object to me use of the word ‘niche’. By that term I simply mean a corner of a much larger and different market. So while the names we mention were able to make their way as professional critics, their style never became the dominant form of discourse for writing about that particular subject matter. Even someone like Roger Ebert, who is both a proper critic and someone who was once the voice of popular criticism in his area, only achieved that success after being soldered to an entertainment reporter and a cheesy evaluation system. Plus, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, had Ebert sat there and given ‘thumbs down’ to every major studio release week after week then chances are it would have been someone else waving his fingers about on TV.

Secondly, as for whether proper criticism is necessarily niche I suspect that there are two approaches to the question. I took the market-based one. If Pauline Kael was cloned fifteen times then I doubt that there would be enough work to support all 16 of them as professional critics. Especially given the recent and much spoken-of contraction in the market for newspaper film criticism. And this is despite Pauline Kael being one of the more accessible intelligent critics out there. What about someone like Armond White? or Serge Daney? or Andre Bazin? if these people were starting out today they would be bloggers.

In video game journalism, the market forces are fairly obvious. There’s a market for writers willing to churn out thousands of pages of hype cut and pasted from press releases or by-the-numbers reviews. But intelligent criticism of games and a genuinely critical take on the industry? you need to look at the blogosphere or academia and academic game studies has its own problems.

The other approach you can take to the question is one based upon talent. According to this view, the reason why not every music review is as good as something written by Lester Bangs is because there aren’t that many people as talented as Lester Bangs. Similarly, if genre criticism were able to produce another John Clute then presumably the market would find space for them too. Ditto film criticism.

It’s something of an unfashionable idea but I have recently reached the conclusion that there really isn’t that much extra talent sloshing about the place. The reason why most books and films are badly written is because there simply aren’t that many talented writers about. The same goes for singing and, I suspect, the same goes for criticism.

However, despite coming to accept this view (as opposed to the more humanistic view that we all have the potential to achieve but environmental factors keep us down), I genuinely do not think that if a generation of brilliant critics were born to us that these critics would hoover up all of the reviewing gigs and so change intelligent, insightful and challenging criticism into the dominant form of popular discourse.

I simply do not have that much faith in the market to believe that.