Criticizing Criticism
Super Mario World is one of the first games I remember playing. For five or six year-old Solomon, “playing” meant entering and exiting the Top Secret Area for infinite power-ups, 1-Ups, and Yoshis. The monotony fueled my gaming madness. I knew nothing else about video games, and I loved Super Mario World.
Twenty years later and I found myself nitpicking apart Super Mario Odyssey, a game I appreciate far more than its SNES counterpart. Two decades of gaming had established a rewarding and beloved past time for me, but it aged me into a whiny, critical curmudgeon. Especially since starting my website, I can rarely play a new game without determining a review score or separating the positives and negatives into semi-concise bullet points. Like an established wine connoisseur, I may appreciate the finer aspects of a video game, but I’m also a pretentious ass who doesn’t understand that every game is good if it takes you away from reality and can be made into a drinking contest.
This same conundrum impacts how I have viewed and currently view my creative endeavors. Until about high school, I believed my writing conveyed the equivalent of God’s gospel. I wrote without fear. Nowadays, I obsessively compare my reviews to those on professional websites, questioning how I ever felt confident enough to publish burning garbage on the internet. I view my videos similarly, often berating my commentary while cursing my microphone’s sound quality.
Ignorance, innocence, and experience constitute the Holy Trinity of enjoying life. Ignorance allows you to ignore what you don’t know and focus only on what you do, which can massage or kick your ass based on the unknown information. Innocence encourages you to enjoy something as it is rather than what it could be, which fosters both content and complacency. Experience brings understanding, insight, and improvement but also self-doubt, regret, and some pessimism. Balancing them all seems to be the right option, especially after I described each one as a double-edged sword. Right now, I happen to be balancing the bad parts of ignorance and innocence with the bad parts of experience.
What a cynical man I am. Regardless of my critical nature, this new style of video (commentary over prerecorded footage) has worked better than talking off the cuff. If you have feedback, let me know! Meanwhile, I’ll fester in this echo chamber of my own doing.