Back before I was a Big-Time History Dork (the technical term for anyone with a PhD in history), I studied Philosophy as well. I loved it dearly, but not enough to pursue it into a postgraduate degree for… reasons. There’s an alternate history version of me that took that path, and I’m sure he had a great time. One thing I’ve struggled with after leaving formal academia, and thus having the time and impetus to read it, is diving deep into philosophical reading. Now, Games as Text is more literary criticism than philosophy, but the two topics share a lot in that they’re generally hard to engage with as a casual reader. Thankfully, Games as Texts is doing its best to fix that problem by being a thoroughly approachable introduction to basic literary criticism and showing how it can be applied to games. Well, video games at least.
Games as Text bills itself as “a practical application of textual analysis to games”, which means that this is more than just an explanation of various critical lenses. While it does serve as an introduction to the most popular, and in some cases newest, critical lenses, it also applies them to the subjects of video games. I’m not sure this always works.
There are places where the book lands in the valley of not quite delivering on either topic - being neither a thorough introduction to the critical technique nor a satisfying deep dive into how that technique can be applied to games. For the most part, though, it manages to blend its goal of being a general introduction with the ambition of providing concrete examples of how to use these critical lens introduced in that chapter. The case studies included in each chapter are the best example of this strategy, as it is in these sections that the book has time to dig a little deeper into one game rather than feeling the need to give a broad picture at the cost of some of the valuable detail.
The chapter on games and queerness is easily the strongest, which is probably no surprise given the authors advocacy work outside of this book. This chapter does the best job of marrying the book’s two goals. It explains the history and development of queer theory, the limitations of how it has been applied at times, and the path forward for future work. It also samples a wide array of games and gives nuanced takes on each one of them. If you only read one chapter from Games as Texts it should be this one (but really you should read the whole book).
While the chapter on games and queerness is the strongest, I think the chapter on games and race may be the weakest. To be fair, it is also maybe the most ambitious as it tries to cover both race and postcolonialism in one brief chapter. These subjects are, of course, deeply intertwined but they are also incredibly complex - especially postcolonialism which has had several decades to develop its many threads, none of which are easy to untangle. I think the chapter does a decent job at introducing core concepts like postcolonialism and orientalism, but I think it struggles somewhat in terms of how to adapt these to video games specifically.
I think a crucially underexplored dimension to applying postcolonialism and orientalism to video game criticism is the role of Japan in the game’s industry. Japanese publishers like Nintendo, SEGA, Sony, Capcom, etc. are among the biggest and most prestigious publishers in the history of video games. The book, coming from a more literary criticism background, takes as its foundation the Anglo-American lens when discussing orientalism and postcolonialism. This makes sense for literary works, as those two countries dominate English language publishing and so have a huge influence on what books get published. However, this doesn’t feel as valid an approach in terms of the video game industry.
Japan is, of course, a former colonial power with an incredibly troubling colonial history. The postcolonial lens is an incredibly valuable tool for examining Japanese artistic works, as is Japan’s complex relationship with orientalism. This is a challenging subject to engage with as it requires a deep understanding of Japan’s culture and history, as well as those of its neighbors, so it is a big ask. Still, I think this is a missed opportunity in the book to dig in a little more into how video games as an artistic medium differs from literature and how that might require adjustment to these tools.
For example, one of the examples in this chapter is how Resident Evil 5 uses white violence against West Africans and tries to paint over it by making the Africans zombies. This is a rich source for postcolonial dissection, but I think a layer is missing by not digging into the fact that the publisher and designers of this game were Japanese.
That may be asking for more than a small book like this can contain, which I will happily confess to. Games as Text is barely a hundred pages long and its purpose is to be a valuable introduction to students and general readers who may not have experience with critical theory, not a deep dive into those theories. As an introduction it is absolutely a success. The writing is engaging and readable, this is no dense academic textbook you will torture yourself through, and it really underlines how these tools can be used by anyone, not just academics or art critics. The book is an unqualified success for what it aims to be, and it is no real fault that it left me wanting more.