Carmen Maria Machado: ‘I think about video games all the time’

The argument over whether video games count as art is tired. What’s more interesting is the way the medium has shaped and informed our lives and culture. For decades, gaming has provided us with innovative and experiential methods of storytelling, entertained us, given us a means of escapism, challenged us to think, and taught us more about what it means to be human.

Exploring all this is a new book of essays, Critical Hits. Edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado, the collection features essays from writers such as Alexander Chee, Larissa Pham, Hanif Abdurraqib, Octavia Bright and Elissa Washuta, as well as a comic by MariNaomi. 

“I think a lot of writing about games that doesn’t originate from the established game journalism sites, like Polygon or Rock Paper Shotgun, are still litigating that games-as-art question,” says Lennon. “Mainstream coverage is always, like, ‘Games have come a long way since Pong!’ But for people who play regularly, this is a given. I still wasn’t sure how much appetite there would be for literary writers… how many secret gamer-writers could there be?” 

As the collection demonstrates, the answer is a lot. “It was wild how people were like, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ Everything that came in was so good and so interesting and so different. It was a really extraordinary group of artists who had so many things to say,” adds Machado. 

As one might expect from a collection featuring such a wide range of voices, the essays in Critical Hits are as broad as the medium they are focused on, covering meditations on grief through RPGs like Disco Elysium to the complication of playing Call of Duty as an Afghan American teenager. Lennon’s essay, first published by Lit Hub during the pandemic, explores the writer’s relationship to the post-apocalyptic America of Fallout 76, while Machado’s introduction explores her own life through video games. Dazed spoke to Lennon and Machado about Critical Hits, why the term “gamer” is contentious, and how video games can create a sense of community.

How did Critical Hits come about? 

Carmen Maria Machado: During COVID, Graywolf, who is the publisher, were having these cute mental health cocktail hours where we’d get on Zoom and chat and check how everyone was doing. From my memory, I remember being asked what I was doing and I said that, basically, I was playing video games. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t doing anything. Ethan Nosowsky, who is my editor at Graywolf, was like, ‘Has there ever been a video game anthology?’ I was like, ‘That’s a great question. I don’t think so.’ I think he meant from the perspective of writers.

Robert Lennon: I was spending most of my free time shotgunning mutated bats with complete strangers in Fallout, or managing an Animal Crossing island with my wife. It was funny in these Zooms to see some of the uninitiated Graywolf writers come online and wonder what on earth we were talking about. I was thinking… should I invite Mary Jo Bang to come exterminate a horde of ghouls in an abandoned shopping mall?

Carmen Maria Machado: We started off with a certain vision for the book. The question of ‘Are video games art?’ is something we’re well past. We’re not here to litigate. We know that they are and so that doesn’t matter. What we wanted to do was have a really diverse group of writers to provide a very diverse perspective of gaming, by writing about games however they want. We sort of gave them free rein.

I wonder whether part of the reason so few books like this exist was because those who have written essays for this book had previously been excluded from gaming narratives.

Carmen Maria Machado: I think that’s a very likely possibility. It’s funny. I was going back and forth over what I wanted to write about and it was wild how I suddenly realised that I could do a survey of gaming through my life. Being a young woman in the 80s and 90s, and being drawn to and fascinated by games and, yeah, being excluded and not thought of as a person who would participate in that culture or artistic practice. But I always came back to it. I’ve also been so drawn to gaming and so fascinated by it.

J. Robert Lennon: Coming back to games in my forties, and depending so much on them soon after, during the early pandemic, made me realise how much of my creative and intellectual life was formed around the primitive videogame puzzles of my youth: Zork, Atari Adventure, Ms. Pac-Man. They were a different way of making order, of solving problems. This really came in handy in 2020, when everyone was reassessing what their work was for and how they should do it… it was therapeutic to just play, and feel that sensation of finding new pathways through the mess. Building roads for Tom Nook made it easier to edit my story collection.

Carmen Maria Machado: For a long time, no one was making games for someone like me, but I’ve found this space in it that I adore. I’ll also surprise myself. I write about playing Bloodborne and Dark Souls games, which at first I thought there was no way I was going to be able to play. But eventually, I felt empowered to do it after speaking to this random man who so genuinely wanted me to play it and was so excited to talk to me about it. Once I’d practised it, I realised that I was actually pretty good at it. It was a very satisfying reality.

I’m not sure they are for me.

Carmen Maria Machado: It’s funny – my instinct is to be that guy and say, ‘You can do it!’ I think part of the thing that was in my brain blocking me was this inner voice saying, ‘You’re not going to be good at a game that requires a really intense level of skill.’ But when I began to really fuck with it, it was like, ‘Oh wait, I actually can do this.’ It was like something changed inside of me. But I was also re-writing narratives about what I was capable of doing as a... ‘gamer’ is a strong word, but as a person playing a game.

“I think the term ‘gamer’ became exclusive and has lost its shine” – Carmen Maria Machado

Why do you think that term, ‘gamer’, has become so contentious? 

Carmen Maria Machado: Terms become contentious when people police what they mean. I wouldn’t call myself a gamer, but I love video games. I think about video games all the time. But I just know that calling myself a gamer in front of the wrong person... Maybe that’s changed. I’m not talking to people who would say, ‘You’re a girl gamer?’ I’m not in those circles. But it’s a term that has a lot of baggage. It’s very loaded.

J. Robert Lennon: It feels to me like a throwback to a time when games were a niche hobby aimed at a very narrow category of people, who came to think of themselves as an elite group with special skills. The immense popularity of games, combined with developers’ current interest in appealing to different kinds of people and different kinds of facility, has served to render it obsolete. You say it with an eyeroll now.

Carmen Maria Machado: I think the term ‘gamer’ became exclusive and has lost its shine for that reason. When you exclude people or add caveats to something, then people will hesitate to use terms like that. If the term doesn’t grow, if it remains stagnant, it will die.

You both write about gaming as a means of collaboration and community. Why do you think the medium is so good at building those connections?

J. Robert Lennon: The obvious answer is, because you don’t have to be with your friends to be with your friends. I don’t have any online gamer pals, though – the thing I loved about Fallout 76 was the opportunity to rub elbows with strangers. I’m back to doing that in the halls of the college where I teach. At least for me, games don’t take the place of in-person relationships, but I like the idea of them as a new kind of public space.

Carmen Maria Machado: I think even with non-explicitly co-op games, there are ways to share the experience. For me, there was a moment in my life when I thought I was straight, or didn’t know that I was gay, where men were so happy to show me things. It’s weird because it’s annoying and condescending, but it’s also kind of sweet in its own way. I’ve always been interested in that dynamic, especially in something like gaming that, historically, has been explicitly marketed towards men and that men have dominated for so long, but then you have this kind of sweet gesture where they want to bring you into it. You’re having to enter into it mediated through this male presence. And then eventually, figuring out that you want to do this on your own without men, but then also enjoying playing with other people, some of whom are men. I guess gaming is more like television or a movie where you can watch something together. It’s sort of halfway between. 

Critical Hits is published by Greywolf in the US and Serpent's Tail in the UK.

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