This was a really weird ramble and I find myself disagreeing completely. As a lifelong gamer, it rings false because I've read many pieces of game critique and reviews which perfectly capture a game's soul. As a game developer, I just find the perspective confused.
I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.
Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.
I think the author is contrasting video game criticism (which I agree is worthless) with that of other art forms, which I would argue has just become naked promotion to the same degree.
Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever. I would love someone to prove me wrong with some blog or other media outlet that reviews classical music albums and treats them even as harshly as someone like Christgau did rock. It has led to pianists like Lang Lang that are widely reviled among the classical piano community gaining fame and success because critics are simply advertisers in the classical world. Bear in mind, this is an art form in which audiences used to be so critical that Glenn Gould was booed for playing Brahms 1 with Bernstein just because he took slow tempi!
Just look at how RT scores have inflated in film. Or the whole poptimism thing in music. Or the fact that Amanda Gorman was considered one of the best poets in the US a few years ago. There's no critical voice anymore outside of the stodgiest of academic circles.
> Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever
Not in my country. The music critics on national radio are _extremely_ harsh on the performance ('it lacked soul and any sense of the piece, like a student forced by his professor to play scales again and again' was the last I heard, just yesterday, while I was working on installing my father's forge). Likewise, still on national radio, cinema and book critics are extremely harsh.
> which I would argue has just become naked promotion to the same degree.
Everything you said is equally applicable to video game reviews and reviewers. Once again I am compelled to bring up Amiga Power the gaming magazine that dared, to much outrage among publishers, to give review scores lower than 7-8 on the regular. They were very pro-consumer even though in early 90's the press was already treated as ad space that pretends it's not.
This article seems to be more of a rant about bad critical analysis, rather than whether video games are art. Or even a misunderstanding of the purpose of critical analysis.
> And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand.
This seems to be the primary point of the article, rather than anything specific to video games. The author argues that art can be created in any medium, but there is a difference between whether critical analysis of the content is transformative in its own right.
> An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation.
While the author goes on to say that "passive" art forms tend not to have this property, they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
> Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic) ... Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.
Also true for "passive" media.
Critical analysis is not supposed to be a replacement for first-hand experience of any "art" in any medium.
Yeah I found this article quite sloppy and disjointed, and frankly just wrong.
> they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
Basically, the article is "other kinds of art have property A while video games have property B" over and over by cherry-picking examples and ignoring the multitude counter-examples.
Just a meta comment: the question of whether video games are art seems really dated to me, as does the question of defining what art is in the first place. Of course this question has a long history with a variety of different answers, ranging from “art is what people in the art world say is art” to “it operates in a historical form like painting or sculpture.”
I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.
But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.
Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.
I know it wasn’t the whole point of your comment, but I fervently hope the legitimacy of art (of any kind and in any medium) is not conferred by the ‘market’. Plays or shows that end having been seen by under 100 people should still be art (and any recording of them should as well), music made for a very niche audience, games that are played by 10s of people, all of those can be art. A painting made by one person to give to another can be art.
I would prefer to look to the democratization of art as the means and ability for individuals to produce substantial, if small, works at a pace, for an audience, for some reward determined solely by the creator.
At the end of the day, ‘what is art’ and ‘are video games art is a dated sentiment, so I agree, I was just repulsed by the suggestion that the definition/legitimacy of something as art can/should be dictated by ‘The Market’ .
Market was maybe a bad term. I mean more “society at large” and not specifically stuff that makes money.
I am more saying that the idea of caring about “being labeled as art” is not that important anymore. Largely because anyone can make and publish anything nowadays. So a play with 100 viewers is still art, yes, but no one really cares about getting that label.
Thanks for the response. I do like the, largely uncontested, move toward disregarding of the label. It certainly seems to dovetail with a more individualized conception of artistic pursuit that appeals to me.
Tolstoy defines art as that which conveys emotion. Video games convey emotion. I don't understand why an article arguing why video games are art spends so much time on the state of video game criticism. The only two parties involved in a work of art are the creator and the viewer. Why do we need third parties to verify a work of art is legitimate or not? If it conveys the emotion of the creator to the viewer, then it's art.
What doesn't get talked about enough in these sorts of discussions is that the games have a certain tactile and/or rhythmic component to them that movies, music, and most other traditional art forms lack. To me, the most interesting part of any game is how the game "flows"; how snappy the controls are, how the game gives feedback to me pushing buttons on my controller. If the graphics are bad or the story is weak, the game can still be good if the gameplay feels good.
If compared to traditional arts, the closest thing to games would be dancing, because it also has an interactive/kinetic component to it like games. When someone criticizes for the lack of a mature, interesting plot or characters, it's a bit like criticizing a folk dancing performance for the same.
The only video game where I really felt that this is more than just a game is Kentucky Route Zero. It’s an incredible experience.
As an example (no spoiler): at one point the story is about a text adventure game and its creators but the way its told is also mimicking the natural language text adventure games. [0] So it feels like you are playing the game itself (KRZ), but the game is also playing itself (the text adventure game), and you the player are also the part of this text adventure game for a time being. Very hard to explain. Like an old school choose you own adventure book but you are the book, the writer of the book, and whoever plays/reads the book too.
I have to say, this is a really beautiful website. I especially love the link previews
The interpretation of Shadow of the Colossus in the article is really poignant and reminded me once more what a beautiful experience the game was. I think the author would love Soma, although it's obviously a very different game, I think it still invokes the same type of emotion and thinking SotC does when you play it, especially when you take time.
I think that video games can be art, but relatively few are, and most of those that do reach the bar of being considered art aren't particularly avant-garde. Like, taking a couple of artsy-ish games, how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)? Or to put it another way, there's a good number of games that are Discworlds but none that reach the level of the Lord of the Rings: a lot that have a good, concise moral that will stick with you, but none that can change an entire culture. Of course, it could just be that my definition of "art" is too narrow and too high a bar, and there's something to be said about the interactivity of games that gives them greater impact than other media
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person?
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.
Building on ranger207's point about transformative impact: I think the challenge is that game transformations are often invisible to outside observers.
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
All this is just "Games haven't(/can't) had their 'Citizen Kane'" all over again. What are you expecting? What would a "Lord of the Rings" of gaming need to do to be "real art" in your (the general you, I'm not really trying to call you out specifically) eyes?
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
I’m genuinely curious, why is there a transformative requirement for something to be art. I think transformative works can certainly be art, but thanks just a possible characteristic of art. Where does this requirement come from, as in, is it somewhere defined academically, or is this a personal position?
we see games impact culture constantly, especially language. it’s spearheaded shorthand language we use online and texting, influences how people approach problem solving, created social groups and impacted lives. there is a quantitative measure that can show video games have impacted people not only at an emotional level (the standard barometer for determining what “art” is), but how they ripple into the zeitgeist
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)?
I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
If the bar for something being art is that it transforms the mind, it's an incredibly low bar for games. Any game, which is not ridiculously easy, forces the player the learn the controls and the rules of the game (otherwise the player can't progress). The more original the controls and the gameplay is (to the player), the more learning has to happen. For someone disagreeing with this, try watching someone play a first-person shooter for the first time in their life, and then compare it to someone who has been playing Counter-Strike for years. If the resulting difference in skill is not a result of the game transforming the brains of the player, then what is it?
> Once one has learned ‘to see like a factory’, and the risks and benefits of this vision, Factorio is done as an artwork. The artwork has achieved its goal. You can keep playing, but now it is just entertainment, and a toolkit.
I think this 'artistic essence' of Factorio that makes it art and not 'just entertainment' is entirely accidental.
I like Gwern's writing otherwise, but I think that this essay is titanically wrong-headed and unconvincing. I think that Gwern takes the idea of 'art' too much for granted and tries to figure out a way to jam video games into his idea of what art is because games are 'obviously art'.
I fundamentally disagree with the distinction the author puts out.
1. Makes a distinction that video games "transform" the player in a way other media doesn't.
I would argue that every piece of art is "active" in this way, it's just that with non-interactive art, the activity happens within your own mind.
Don't art aficionados and art students sit and stare at a piece for an hour, experiencing something within themselves that goes beyond what they see?
Doesn't reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, take time to truly engage with the writing of the author and "learn" their style in order to appreciate it on a deeper level?
In the same way, engaging with the mechanics of a game and experiencing the ludonarrative cohesion is how one engages with a game on a deeper level.
2. Most game critique is just a cliff notes or description
This is the same for all mass media. Day 1 reviews of books and movies are not intellectual thinkpieces, and with the rise of "second screen content", most tv/movies are not meant to be experienced any deeper than at 1.5x speed while you're washing dishes.
It's asinine to compare pop culture reviews for a mass audience for video games to the highest form of literary or film critique.
I think games, via player agency, have the potential to one day be more profound than any other existing medium, but we're also hamstrung by the fact that providing player agency requires being able to simulate how the world changes in response to that agency, which we're still very limited in our ability to do.
As for critical analysis - I don't see why it can't be done for games as for any other artform - at the end of the day all such analysis, including of more passive artforms, really boils down to 'did you enjoy it, and are others likely to enjoy it as well?'.
Video game reviews are so bad. But the neat thing is that they're blatantly bad and that makes me to question criticism of other art forms, which I used to subconsciously see as absolute authority over my taste.
In this regard, video game reviews have been net positive for me personally.
Let's take the definition of "video-game art" as the art of defining interactive experiences that open themselves up upon mastery.
This is the original definition of what video-games were at the start (Pac-Man, Space Invaders).
The mastery takes effort to learn; the game, to incentivize this effort, rewards the player when they do well, and punish them when they don't.
The almost immediate nature of the feedback loop makes learning faster than almost any other human activity.
Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it.
This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals.
The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.
However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay.
A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes.
Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game.
Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc.
Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.
The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner.
They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.
I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.
tetris, doom, minecraft will be remembered for centuries/millenia, unlike whatever jeff koonz or whatever his name is gets other people to make for him
I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.
Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.
Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever. I would love someone to prove me wrong with some blog or other media outlet that reviews classical music albums and treats them even as harshly as someone like Christgau did rock. It has led to pianists like Lang Lang that are widely reviled among the classical piano community gaining fame and success because critics are simply advertisers in the classical world. Bear in mind, this is an art form in which audiences used to be so critical that Glenn Gould was booed for playing Brahms 1 with Bernstein just because he took slow tempi!
Just look at how RT scores have inflated in film. Or the whole poptimism thing in music. Or the fact that Amanda Gorman was considered one of the best poets in the US a few years ago. There's no critical voice anymore outside of the stodgiest of academic circles.
Not in my country. The music critics on national radio are _extremely_ harsh on the performance ('it lacked soul and any sense of the piece, like a student forced by his professor to play scales again and again' was the last I heard, just yesterday, while I was working on installing my father's forge). Likewise, still on national radio, cinema and book critics are extremely harsh.
Everything you said is equally applicable to video game reviews and reviewers. Once again I am compelled to bring up Amiga Power the gaming magazine that dared, to much outrage among publishers, to give review scores lower than 7-8 on the regular. They were very pro-consumer even though in early 90's the press was already treated as ad space that pretends it's not.
> And so, good art game criticism can only be understood by those who have no need of it; a hand may point at the moon, but once you see the moon, you no longer need to look at the hand.
This seems to be the primary point of the article, rather than anything specific to video games. The author argues that art can be created in any medium, but there is a difference between whether critical analysis of the content is transformative in its own right.
> An artful video game cannot be described, because it is not a description but a transformation.
While the author goes on to say that "passive" art forms tend not to have this property, they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
> Game art criticism only works when it conveys the transformativeness on the player (ie. reviewer/critic) ... Given the commercial realities, perhaps this cannot be fixed, and we must accept that timely reviews are ultimately the “Cliff Notes” of games.
Also true for "passive" media.
Critical analysis is not supposed to be a replacement for first-hand experience of any "art" in any medium.
1. You can't criticize a game without actually playing it. Or even review it for that matter <looks at modern game reviews>.
2. It reminded me why I refuse to try Factorio :)
> they offer only a few counter examples without touching on a whole library of classic literature that scholars are still arguing about hundreds of years later.
Basically, the article is "other kinds of art have property A while video games have property B" over and over by cherry-picking examples and ignoring the multitude counter-examples.
I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.
But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.
Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.
I would prefer to look to the democratization of art as the means and ability for individuals to produce substantial, if small, works at a pace, for an audience, for some reward determined solely by the creator.
At the end of the day, ‘what is art’ and ‘are video games art is a dated sentiment, so I agree, I was just repulsed by the suggestion that the definition/legitimacy of something as art can/should be dictated by ‘The Market’ .
I am more saying that the idea of caring about “being labeled as art” is not that important anymore. Largely because anyone can make and publish anything nowadays. So a play with 100 viewers is still art, yes, but no one really cares about getting that label.
If compared to traditional arts, the closest thing to games would be dancing, because it also has an interactive/kinetic component to it like games. When someone criticizes for the lack of a mature, interesting plot or characters, it's a bit like criticizing a folk dancing performance for the same.
As an example (no spoiler): at one point the story is about a text adventure game and its creators but the way its told is also mimicking the natural language text adventure games. [0] So it feels like you are playing the game itself (KRZ), but the game is also playing itself (the text adventure game), and you the player are also the part of this text adventure game for a time being. Very hard to explain. Like an old school choose you own adventure book but you are the book, the writer of the book, and whoever plays/reads the book too.
0, imagine something like Inform https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
The interpretation of Shadow of the Colossus in the article is really poignant and reminded me once more what a beautiful experience the game was. I think the author would love Soma, although it's obviously a very different game, I think it still invokes the same type of emotion and thinking SotC does when you play it, especially when you take time.
That’s an odd bar to cross in order to define art, if that’s what you mean there. I’ve seen plenty of art in my life (not hard to do living in Italy) and most of it didn’t change me as a person. It was still art though.
When someone reads Lord of the Rings, they can talk about it with others who haven't. The shared cultural vocabulary emerges from discussion. But when a game fundamentally changes how you perceive systems or choices, that shift happens inside your head. You can't really show someone else.
I played Factorio for a LOT of hours many years back. For months afterward, I genuinely couldn't stop seeing bottlenecks and throughput problems everywhere. Traffic, grocery stores, my own work. It sounds silly describing it, but the perceptual shift was real. Nobody around me noticed because there was nothing external to notice.
Maybe games won't produce the next Lord of the Rings because their transformations are too personal and too hard to share?
When someone watches a movie, or engages with any other art form, are they "transformed"?
Games are certainly a unique art form, but I reject the idea that they are somehow unable to produce a "shared cultural vocabulary", or that the experience of playing a game can't be discussed to just as rich a level as, say, the experience of watching a movie, or listening to a piece of music. Ultimately, to fully engage in a dialogue about a work of art, you need to experience that work in its intended form, this should be obviously true of music, movies, painting, and games. But to set games apart as somehow less able to be fully discussed is nonsense.
I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
I think this 'artistic essence' of Factorio that makes it art and not 'just entertainment' is entirely accidental.
I like Gwern's writing otherwise, but I think that this essay is titanically wrong-headed and unconvincing. I think that Gwern takes the idea of 'art' too much for granted and tries to figure out a way to jam video games into his idea of what art is because games are 'obviously art'.
1. Makes a distinction that video games "transform" the player in a way other media doesn't.
I would argue that every piece of art is "active" in this way, it's just that with non-interactive art, the activity happens within your own mind.
Don't art aficionados and art students sit and stare at a piece for an hour, experiencing something within themselves that goes beyond what they see?
Doesn't reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, take time to truly engage with the writing of the author and "learn" their style in order to appreciate it on a deeper level?
In the same way, engaging with the mechanics of a game and experiencing the ludonarrative cohesion is how one engages with a game on a deeper level.
2. Most game critique is just a cliff notes or description
This is the same for all mass media. Day 1 reviews of books and movies are not intellectual thinkpieces, and with the rise of "second screen content", most tv/movies are not meant to be experienced any deeper than at 1.5x speed while you're washing dishes.
It's asinine to compare pop culture reviews for a mass audience for video games to the highest form of literary or film critique.
As for critical analysis - I don't see why it can't be done for games as for any other artform - at the end of the day all such analysis, including of more passive artforms, really boils down to 'did you enjoy it, and are others likely to enjoy it as well?'.
In this regard, video game reviews have been net positive for me personally.
Given the nature of the medium, you can tackle a theme (space invaders), and even a story on top of it. This is good for critics; they know stories, they know that books are the highest form of art for intellectuals. The currency of critics in the system (media/advertisement/entertainment industry loop) is credentialism -- except for purely independent critics you have their own platform and exist through a complex bidirectional relationship with their audience.
However, the story is almost always at odds with gameplay. A story limits the freedom the gameplay system can respond to the player by railroading certain outcomes. Often, adapting a story implies different scenes that cannot fit into a game genre, so it's more appropriate to a collection of mini-games rather than what people generally consider to be a game. Video-game stories tend towards tropes that don't cause such problems for itself, such as the 'big tournament' arc. Of course, certain genres have much more freedom (RPGs), but still a definite story means certain characters can't or have to die, etc, which remove the meaning of player choices.
The mastery approach hasn't gone away. But critics hate it; the general philosophy of the industry is inclusivity, which is at direct odds with a competitive direct ranking of players according to skills. It requires effort, and rewards innate ability -- reflex, memory, ability to make mental computations, ... are all advantages that generally directly translate into in-game advantages. So the critics industry had been relentless at disparaging the games that directly emphasized mastery (arcade designs, the infamous 'God Hand' review) and elevate what are generally called 'movie-games' that have worked at eliminating these aspects ('Last of Us', later 'God of war') to let all players experience the story fully without interacting with the gameplay in any meaningful manner. They had to compromise because of the success of Dark Souls that brought mastery back to the forefront, but this is where the total incompetence of mainstream critics is truly glaring (see the infamous 'Cuphead' journalist moment). As a result, their critiques are rarely anything more than press releases with a final score based on production value and not based on any insight into the depth of game mechanics and systems.
I'm surprised not to see Chris Crawford mentioned, as The Art of Computer Game Design (1984) makes the central point of this article at the very beginning, and is a primary source of video-game critique.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
Your point still stands though.