 Perhaps the only uncontroversial thing one can say about the Last of Us Part 2 is that it is deeply controversial. What's interesting about the polarized discourse surrounding it, though, is the game is being evaluated not just on its undeniable technical brilliance, but its thematic ambition, character motivations, and story execution. There may be meticulously crafted animations, luscious environments, an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive, but people are critiquing the game for its rendition of cycles of vengeance, its examination of violence in games, its deconstruction of the medium and ourselves. This makes the Last of Us Part 2 not a toaster. What the hell does this mean? In his book How to Talk About Video Games, Ian Bogos suggests that we talk about games like we do toasters. How? Our critical language looks at a game's features and evaluates it like a consumer product. Shiny chrome and evenly distributed warmth? Five stars. Good graphics sound and gameplay? Nine out of ten. Not only is this method reductive, it minimizes the aesthetic merit of games and limits what we can say about them. Toaster evaluation is deeply utilitarian, and so too has game criticism followed suit for too long. Games are commercial products under this view, not art or culture. And so the Last of Us Part 2 is untoaster-like, because even though the simple mention of the game may summon controversy from the deepest corners of cyberspace, it is being celebrated and critiqued for what its value is as an artistic object, not as a toaster, not as a commercial fodder, because the Last of Us Part 2 is technically one of the shiniest toasters out there. This makes the game somewhat ironically hopeful, despite the game itself and the language surrounding it being bleak, disjointed, and ultimately conflicted. Another very untoaster-like game is Death Stranding. The consensus about the game's critical consensus suggests it was similarly divisive, but its aggregate score on Metacritic is still an 83. Wait though, the Last of Us 2 scored a 93. Inflated scores in games is still a symptom of toaster syndrome. We are reviewing games as functional objects of commodity consumption. We only score them low if they physically don't work, if they don't perform a use. Death Stranding was weird though. Its gameplay constitutes several dozen hours of walking. If it were a George Foreman grill, we would not trust it to heat fire. There is plenty of it, but there is plenty of what. Death Stranding is a deconstruction, really. It is a game that foregrounds the silliness of our frenzied quests from A to B in games, but it also reveals the absurdity of defining games. Players argue games need rules, goals, but Death Stranding is a triple-A avant-garde game. It is about the aesthetic experience of traversal through space, about the intimacy of asynchronous human interaction, about the sleep of death when dreams may come. It is about our evolutionary instinct to persist, but also to reflect on the peril of that persistence. To talk about Death Stranding is hard though. The only way to describe it is to call it a mix of walking simulator, journey, and zen in the art of motorcycle. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said about defining things including games, we describe by family resemblances, by its similarity to other games of a supposed canon. Evaluating a game based on its adherence to genre is pointless though, if there is no genre for it to be compared to. We have to evaluate Death Stranding for its aesthetic, thematic and phenomenological weight, its ability to enrapture us, inspire us, or perhaps in its failure to do so. The Last of Us Part II and Death Stranding reveal distinct but complementary things about the state of video game criticism. Both where it has been and perhaps where it might go. Critical reviews for the Last of Us Part II are mostly positive, but the heated discussion surrounding it has almost nothing to do with its technical accomplishments. It is somehow both product and art. We can call this the Toaster Uncertainty Principle. Death Stranding, in removing most things resembling convention and video game formalism of what we normally consider the product of games, forces us to evaluate aesthetics and question the definition of games. Both games are not toasters. For better or worse, they are art. Criticism is a storied and venerated field, a rigorous academic discipline. It overlaps with aesthetics, the philosophical pursuit of what is beautiful, but criticism is more specific. It is about evaluating the specific merits of objects and their impact on us. In his book On Criticism, Noel Carroll says criticism is ultimately about evaluation with reasons, but like Death Stranding, it is about understanding the experience something generates, not its adherence to formalism. He states, it is the taste of the pudding the critic cares about, not its adherence to an established recipe. What does this criticism look like, though? Carroll provides us steps, description, what does the game entail, contextualization, the circumstances surrounding the game's production and distribution, elucidation, an analysis of its symbolic motifs, interpretation and understanding of the overall meaning of a piece, and finally, analysis, which as he says is to promote the audience's understanding and appreciation of the artwork and the ground and evaluation of the work. This means good criticism involves recognizing that Death Stranding blends mediums in ways that subverts rigid game classification, that the context of lower budgets in indie games require we appreciate innovation and efficiency in design, that the tragedy at the heart of Wander's quest in Shadow of the Colossus is not just his but ours. We are engaging with works on their own terms, we are partaking in what is called a close read, but ultimately, it is about enlightening, clarifying, about revealing not just why games are good, but why they matter. But this seemingly flies in the face of what students are taught in schools of literary criticism. Criticism is about analyzing through different interpretive lenses, through a post-structuralist or Marxist or formalist or deconstructive lens. Art reflects the biases of the era it is in, though, the author is dead, right? Interpretation is now recognized by many as the anarchic domain of infinite interpretations, an anxiety only placated by the invocation of some framework, some perspective. A post-colonial critique of Far Cry 2 and how its omission of civilians obfuscates the truth, or how horizon zero dawn, although superficially evocative of ecology, is actually anti-ecological at a mechanical level. These lenses provide fascinating insights into not just games, but the cultural context they exist in. This leaves us with a problem though, is criticism subjective or objective? Is it opinionated, or the unearthing of some universal form? In his book The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Fry argues criticism is or ought to be like a science. There are works of art that are higher, better, more worthy of consideration. To get to this, we have to construct a formalism, a rubric to evaluate things by. Remember, criticism is evaluation with reasons. Games are both art and science, and to be evaluated thus. We can invoke narrative frameworks to discuss why Uncharted is paced well. Use poetic frameworks like defamiliarization to argue for how undertale is metafictional genius. We can even cite science, as Steve Swink does in his book Game Feel, to argue why Mario just feels good to play, or how games meet our psychological needs. Whether psychology, sociology, or art theory, games criticism under this view should encourage frameworks of analysis, both in the academic and literary study of games. But if we are going to evaluate games using the scaffolding of some formalism, why not use a formalism for the design of games themselves? In his essay, I have no words and I must design, Greg Kostakhan set in motion the program to develop a vocabulary for good design practice. What makes a good game on its own terms? The MDA framework, the Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics framework, is the most famous of these, establishing the what, how, and why of play, and how to craft different types of games. For the longest time, there was a debate between lodologists and narratologists, or games play or story. Countless books, articles, and videos are now being made on the design of games, invoking and creating a language as they go. There is Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design, Raph Kostakhan's A Theory of Fun, Game Mechanics, Advanced Game Design. Why is Mario 1-1 so good is now a meme? It has interesting decisions, precise mechanics, it teaches without teaching. Good criticism here is understanding that the strange mechanics of eco, its architecture and puzzle design, are there to reinforce an emotion, a theme. But then where does the vitality of personal experience enter the fray? Is all criticism better when it is subsumed by the interpretive lenses of someone, or the contrived formalism of another? To answer this, we must turn to aesthetics, where fellows like Kant and Hume said we can actually peer into universals through subjective analysis. The line between the two is broken. Through the cultivation of good judgment, a critic can put aside their biases and peer into universal forms of beauty. When a critic is criticized, they often say it's just their opinion, but there are good opinions and bad opinions, arguments that are justified and arguments that aren't. But a good critic can put aside their personal preferences and analyze the work of art in itself. Doing this requires expertise. Only someone adept at fighting games should be analyzing the intricacies of a game's meta. But a good critic knows a good fighting game even if they themselves don't like it. There needs to be an understanding of the structure of a game, a cultivation of analysis as a skill that takes time and dedication. But if to evaluate something in itself is to suppress one's personal whims, is there even a space for the artistry of personal opinion to reside? One of the first comprehensive attempts at a critical language for games came in the form of Ian Bogost and his book Unit Operations. In the book, he argues we need to analyze games using their procedures and understand units of meaning, of symbolic relevance at the structural level. Journey communicates unity by endowing you with more abilities when you meet another. It's a clear unit operation of meaning. Metal Gear Solid 2 has minor instances of meaning to reinforce the idea of lies, of memes, of post-modern meta-fiction. Kojima lied about who we were playing in the game, just as Raiden is lied to about his past, his present, and his purpose. Every unit operation of the game, both in mechanics and fiction, reinforced the theme of meme, of information and lies. Jonathan Blow did something similar with The Witness. Each area of the island systemizes different ideas about the nature of truth. The individual symbols in these games can be understood as part of a grander scheme where the intentions of both Kojima and Blow matter in the evaluation of the work of art. This analysis can be extended to systems as well. Games like Civilization and SimCity have meaning encoded, biased in the system, whether intentional or not. The game critic needs to be able to unearth this, to analyze the systems of games at both a unit and systemic level. But of course, games involve play, which complicates things. Games are ergodic texts, they require work to unearth. In his book, The Ethics of Computer Games, Miguel Cicard argues that the meaning of games is not just encoded in a system, it is also constructed by the player, both in participation and interpretation. What does this mean? It means evaluating a game is not simply a matter of unearthing symbols and assigning some rigid meaning. The experience of games is different for everyone. In literary circles, there are theories like reader-response theory that says interpretation is paramount within communities that do so. But games have a stronger claim. In his essay, Across Worlds and Bodies, Brendan Keough argues for a reconciliation between subjective and objective critical lenses. He says, The academic video game critic, as opposed to the game studies formalist, must be concerned with understanding how and why certain video games feel to play, then with how well it fits into a predetermined and arbitrary notion of gameness. This method of video game criticism cannot help but be phenomenologically grounded, accounting for and tracing meaning through bodies and worlds without privileging one or the other. It cannot distinguish between game and non-game elements of the video game, as has previously been done. According to Keough, games are cybernetic systems. There are feedback loops between human and machine. What this means is that you, yes you, are actually a part of the formalism of a game, because you are literally a part of the game. When Psycho Mantis pointed at you through the screen, the game simply foregrounded the inevitable truth that we are all in fact a part of the game. This means our subjective experiences and impressions are a part of the game itself. Keough then critiques what the formal, academic and institutional study of games has entailed. There is a broader suspicion in game studies to subjective critical analysis of games that do not contribute to some formal universal understanding of what games are. Circling back to Noelle Carroll's words, games are being evaluated in accordance with their adherence to recipe and not for the taste of the dish. Ironically, in an instrumental medium, games are being instrumentalized to give us insights into the nature of games and play instead of being evaluated on their own terms, or more precisely, in the experiences they create for those participating in their creation. So now the floodgates open for a radical perspectivism in games criticism and a crystallization of what criticism might actually be. It is to evaluate games for their own sake, on their own terms, the real meaning of toasterfying games, using them for purposes other than their own evaluation. Instrumentalization is not wrong though. We need formal analysis of the art and science of games, consumer review, and design formalism. But what we also need is for games to speak for themselves. Given that we are a part of the formalism of games, it is our responsibility to speak for them. But then the way we choose to speak about games is just that. Our choice. It is a methodological anarchism. So a formal analysis of games actually leads to a phenomenological one, but our subjective critique of games is also enhanced the more we understand about games. When Clint Hawking critiqued Bioshock for its incoherence between gameplay and story, he coined the term ludonarrative dissonance. The piece of writing it came from though was criticism. It was a close read of his personal experience with playing the game. But Hawking is also an esteemed game designer. He says, Bioshock is not our citizen cane, but it does more than any game I have ever played. Show us how close we are to achieving that milestone. Bioshock reaches for it and slips. But we leave our deepest footprints when we pick ourselves up from a fall. It seems to me that it will take several years to learn from Bioshock's mistakes and create a new generation of games that do manage to successfully marry their ludic and narrative themes. So criticism can lead to formalism, but so too can formalism enhance our criticism. In fact, it can change how we see games entirely. Before I'd even played Final Fantasy XIII, I'd heard it was suffocatingly linear. This was a critical consensus it would seem. When I played the game, I thought the same. The game is a line, a singular, highly polished corridor. That is, until I read Hills and Lines by Simon Ferrari. The first 20 hours of the game asked the player to follow a straight line towards a checkpoint. This corridor, perhaps the longest unbroken span of narrow, unilinear space in video game history, makes one realize something that was true of Final Fantasy games all along. We've always been running in a straight line. But then he points out the brilliant thematic weight of this design decision. In Final Fantasy XIII, there are two worlds, Cocoon, which is the linear corridor we have been on, and Pulse, which is where the game opens up. Cocoon is a bounded sphere where humans are simultaneously provided for and controlled in every conceivable way. And so the linearity is a metaphor for a carefully contrived and designed environment. Pulse, though, is meant to represent freedom, a laissez-faire ethic of infinite choice. Space is both thematic and metafictional, revealing the nature of games as artifice. However, it is in the contrast between Pulse and Cocoon that the game truly communicates its meaning. He continues, grasping the conflict between Cocoon and Pulse requires neither video nor text. Reviewers of Final Fantasy XIII remarked that the game gets better or truly begins to shine when the player hits the 20-hour mark. That's when the player transitions from Cocoon to Pulse. We trade a series of stifling hallways for a wide open world. In Pulse, it is somewhat difficult to find one's way to a definite goal. Many enemies will instantly kill the player's team on being engaged. The literacy model carefully constructed throughout the first half of the game flies out the window. Instead, the player is left to fend for themselves, to pick her battles and hope for the best. She has left a world where everything a human needs is provided by divine stewards, entering another where the demigods have decided to let natural selection reign. Does this mean Final Fantasy XIII is a good or bad toaster? Neither. It means through criticism, aspects of its nature are elucidated, the audience's confusion is clarified, and insights into the nature of games and play are gleaned. A critical analysis was enhanced by formalism and informed it all the same. We understand every playthrough of games as different. It is a playthrough, after all. In one of the most interesting playthroughs of the game Far Cry 2, Permadeath, Ben Abraham documents his experience with playing the game with a single life, and how this constraint completely altered how he approached the game. Every corner was a renewed chance for death. The fear and dread was amplified to a fever pitch. This was a precursor to the modern Let's Play, an ethnographic, almost anthropological survey of one's first-hand experience playing the game. We watch people play and react to games, most likely because we all recognize every play of the game is a different play of the game. So a critic's personal knowledge and experience is just the first step of this. What this means is that honest and objective writing about games will always be deeply subjective. Participation implies ownership, authorship. However, there is also a universality to our subjective experiences. Compilations of people's experiences with games reveal similar emotions at key beats. Personal experiences can reveal insights about the human condition. So a good critic is also highly attuned to their own experience of games as they play them. As Brendan Keough puts it, to understand what is actually happening in a moment of video game play, the critic must attend to both what the player is consciously aware of and what the player is trying to ignore. When we play games, we often ignore the fiction. We ignore that games are played on physical hardware and instantiated by code. And mostly, we forget that without us, the game does not exist. When I finished The Last of Us Part 2, I was more confused than anything else. In fact, I still don't know what to think about the game. Frameworks and lenses and formalism are then a crutch when writing. We can analyze the game by its unit operations, by how each of its sequences is there to reinforce its criticism of violence, of humanity. We can look at the context of the game and suppose it is a response to endless criticism towards Naughty Dog, for luden art of dissonance, or how the leaks of the game frame people's expectations before they even played it. We can cite the lead developer's childhood experiences of the Israel-Palestine conflict to contextualize the core theme of cycles of retribution. I have read people arguing how the game is the first of a lineage of daughter games, how the strange character motivations in the game are about guilt or grief or PTSD that we are supposed to be angry. Then I watched Kurt Vonnegut's speech on storytelling and how the singular brilliance of Hamlet is that it kinda just has a series of events that happens. Gravitas, sure, but just incidental things. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, goes the quote. Then The Last of Us Part 2's incoherence became coherent, at least for a moment. Why do we impose this expectation on stories, that there needs to be a payoff? Why is there a shape to stories at all? Do I still know what I think about The Last of Us Part 2? Outside of the fact that it is a shiny toaster, not really. Before I read about others' experiences of the game, as well as the formalism of both games and stories, as well as examining my own personal view on experiencing the game, the more something resembling coherent thoughts about it start to manifest. Could we analyze the gameplay systems of the game? Sure. Could we analyze the embedded narrative sequences in the game? Yes. Could we do a Marxist critique of the sociopolitical nature of post-apocalyptic society? Sure. Could I write to you about the process of formulating thoughts? Well, yes. Noelle Carroll said criticism is about the taste of the dish, not its adherence to recipe. But recipes are also important, for then there would be no dish. Writing about criticism is itself criticism, and so my personal opinion here is both valid and invalid. This is the criticism uncertainty principle. I think criticism is a craft that is cultivated by being both radically attuned to one's own experience of a game, combined with the experiences of others, combined with the knowledge of the form and function of the medium you are in. It is the taste of the dish, and others taste of the dish, and its adherence or deviation from recipes near and far, and why others should dine there, and why some don't like the dish, and why that's okay, and why we even make dishes to begin with.