Playing Together
A collection of essays by writers who play video games resonates both as a cultural commentary and as a means of calling on shared experience.
Review by Sara Holston
My sophomore year of college, I bonded with my roommate by playing through her favorite game. It’s largely a single-player game, yet we played it “together”: The time I spent exploring the world, interacting with the other characters, and completing challenges and puzzles, she spent watching me play (with frequent advice or commentary).
This might strike some people as odd. After all, video games are meant to be played. They’re an inherently interactive medium—aren’t they? What’s the point of simply watching someone else play a game? While I could offer at least half a dozen reasons, the one that always made the most sense to me was the fundamental satisfaction of sharing something you love with someone else. It’s delightful to witness someone experiencing something important to you for the first time. It can help us recapture what it felt like our first time. But perhaps most importantly, it’s gratifying to feel more known by someone who has shared an experience that’s important to you. Playing Tales of Symphonia with my roommate fast-tracked our friendship; experiencing something that was so formative for her was like getting a peek inside her head, and watching me react to something she knew so well, and sometimes make different decisions than she had, helped her peek inside mine.
Reading Graywolf Press’s recently released essay collection Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games feels like watching 18 different people play games that have shaped them in significant ways. The volume features essays in which, as you might have guessed, each writer reflects on a particular game—what it has meant to them in their life, how they’ve felt playing it, how their relationship to the game and its characters and world has changed over time.
This is a refreshing take, given where the popular discourse on gaming usually falls. While the conversation among scholars and others in the field is fairly robust and diverse, in broader circles it seems stuck in the “justification” stage—as with movies and genre novels before, the discourse on games has largely circled around whether they are a “trashy” medium, whether they might do more harm than good to society and its values, whether or not they can really stand with these other media as true art forms (most people taking up this question settle on “not”). This book doesn’t seem to be trying to do any of that. The premise of the collection isn’t to prove that smart people of good taste can get value out of video games. Instead, it’s an opportunity for these writers to share some part of themselves, through the lens of a game that has meant something to them.
Using such recognizable games as anchor points invites readers who may not otherwise relate to the experiences or perspectives of “gamers” to find some common ground.
In the first essay of the collection, the connection to the chosen video game seems almost irrelevant at times, fading in and out of focus as author Elissa Washuta wrestles with the more personal experiences she’s writing about. She moves seamlessly between the two topics—the post-zombie-apocalypse game The Last of Us and her own struggles with her health—first a paragraph at a time, then suddenly sentence-by-sentence as she builds to the heart of her story. When she writes about the liberating decision to remove her fallopian tubes, complicated by the specter of the forced sterilization of other Native women, the game is almost forgotten. The metaphor has assumed a newly sharpened relevance, but it is nevertheless eclipsed by Washuta’s storytelling. When the game connection snaps back into focus, it’s much clearer—much deeper. Now that we know what Washuta is wrestling with, we can better see how this game resonates with her, and why. By getting a look inside that resonance, we can start to grasp some of the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions she acknowledges not being ready to fully put into words.
Many of the games considered here are extremely well known—in addition to The Last of Us, it covers titles like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario Bros. Using such recognizable games as anchor points invites readers who may not otherwise relate to the experiences or perspectives of “gamers” to find some common ground, and to begin to understand why and how people play video games—or perhaps, simply to understand a few of the people who happen to do so. Many of us have heard of Call of Duty even if we haven’t played it, so we have some frame of reference for Jamil Jan Kochai’s exploration of how it felt to be an Afghan American immigrant, playing as an American soldier killing Afghan insurgents. When Eleanor Henderson talks about encouraging her sons’ love of video games, rather than trying to police their screentime, she likens her quest to buy them a PS5 at a Black Friday sale to trying to “save the princess.” Whether you’ve played every Super Mario Bros installment ever released or you just barely recognize the name “Princess Peach,” the metaphor resonates. The collection is full of little moments like that—for both longtime gamers who will pick up all the references to obscure indie games and for those just glad to recognize a title.
We all know shared experiences help shape empathy, but it’s good to be reminded sometimes that it doesn’t have to mean sharing the bad experience—even the little things we have in common can be enough.
One of the most personal resonances for me came in the introduction to the collection, in which Carmen Maria Machado, the co-editor with J. Robert Lennon, writes about cooking food in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Cooking is a simple mechanic in the game: the player, as main character Link, collects ingredients while exploring the world and uses them to create dishes that can restore Link’s health. It’s fun for players to figure out what combinations of ingredients create which results, and the power-ups cooking offers can be handy—but it’s not an especially significant part of the game. For Machado, though, this mechanic was the only thing that got her through a book tour for a personal memoir she found it extremely difficult to talk about. Every night, when she returned to her hotel room emotionally drained and dissociating, she would boot up Breath of the Wild and cook recipes until she fell asleep listening to the “stupid little tune that play[s] when you coo[k] a meal.” I can’t exactly relate to the kind of emotionally grueling marathon Machado describes, but I have played that game, and I could hear Link’s hum and delighted laugh as she wrote about it. Seeing that mechanic through Machado’s eyes helped me to envision what it might have been like to go through what she did, and how and why this game might have helped.
And Machado’s account also added something to the game for me. About a year ago, I (finally) went back to actually finish this game in preparation to play its new sequel. As I was cooking a batch of healing meals before the final battle, listening to Link’s hum and the chime that signaled the recipe was complete, I thought about another gamer doing that same thing, somewhere else in the world, several years ago, as a lifeline. “Watching” Machado play Breath of the Wild by reading her introduction to this collection made a small, previously insignificant aspect of the game into which I had sunk triple digit hours into something new. We all know shared experiences help shape empathy, but it’s good to be reminded sometimes that it doesn’t have to mean sharing the bad experience—even the little things we have in common can be enough.
The collection’s subtitle, then, is extremely fitting: not writers on videogames, but writers playing videogames. This collection doesn’t seem to have any unified point it’s trying to make, except maybe that the people who play video games are, well, people. At the end of the day, it isn’t even really about video games. Rather, reflecting on these games and their experiences with them is simply the vehicle through which these writers pen a series of very different, very personal essays. Seeing games I know through their eyes helped me get to know them, just like it did with my college roommate. Many of my friends and I have been blessed to celebrate the way other shared cultural experiences do this—lending each other books or watching the cartoons we grew up on together. I’m glad to see the editors of this book inviting readers to celebrate the ways video games can do this, too.
Sara Holston is a student at HLS, and the current managing editor of Fare Forward.
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games was released by Graywolf Press on November 21, 2023. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
