Critical Distance is a games website that curates and archives video game criticism. In its mission statement, it says it was “founded to answer the question: ‘Where is all the good writing about games?'” It has the function of a review journal or one of the literary magazines, in that it’s a hub for readers and the broader critically-minded community. If you want to think about games, or you want to explore informed, thoughtful perspectives, it’s a great overview of where to start. They have compilations of scholarship on particular games as well, and interviews with various figures – it’s really sort of a portal for discovery. One of their features is a weekly roundup of writing on video games from the previous week, titled ‘This Week in Video Game Blogging’. They’ll usually include about ten essays at a time. They’ve even included a couple of my essays before, which is cool. I checked, and over the course of 2023, across this weekly feature, Critical Distance have linked out to 283 writers and critics discussing video games.

So – there are a couple of things to say about this number. In the first instance, it’s great that there are so many writers doing interesting things, and it’s fun to get to learn about them. In the second – when you think about it, maybe that number isn’t very high. You could get that many people in a room. I feel like that’s a medium-sized conference. Obviously it’s not all the critics writing about games on the internet, but – it still feels slightly shocking to have a finite figure placed on the number of people out there, even if it is just a sample. Online, scholarship or criticism always feels slightly ethereal. It feels endless, like we’re awash in a sea that just goes on forever. Putting hard numbers on it is a little startling. It’s like discovering that a book’s gone out of print: it’s a material limit to something that sort of felt like it was going to go on forever.

Over the weekend, hbomberguy released a video about plagiarism online. It was mostly focused on Youtube, in particular the creator James Somerton, but it also discussed things like the IGN plagiarism scandal with editor Filip Miucin back in 2018. It’s just under four hours of granular, forensic evidence, with line-by-line comparisons showing how certain plagiarists use minor edits and word changes to obscure their sources. Plagiarism is, again, evidence of the material limits of what’s available online. It’s repetition, which breaks the illusion of the infinite. There isn’t just stuff forever: there is a finite pool of people writing and thinking, and then a surrounding layer of people repackaging and redistributing their material, through means more or less legitimate. Plagiarism sits along the boundary between those two realms, falsely inflating the borders of original work by appearing original when it’s really part of the redistribution network. It is weirdly paradoxical: plagiarists take advantage of the volume of material out there, but also illustrate how that material is a finite resource – how there’s less of it than you might think. They rely on plenty but prove scarcity.

Terms like ‘original’ and ‘derivative’ do threaten to be unhelpful in discussing plagiarism – really it’s about clarity regarding what’s your work and what’s not. Critical Distance is a really useful example of the difference. In their round-ups, they bring together a showcase of criticism rather than making their own. They are curators. That’s their work. It’s deeply wrapped around the ideas and writing of other people, but there’s such a clear line between what’s theirs and what belongs to the writers they’re promoting. In a similar vein, I write a lot about historical Christian thinkers. I like exploring what they said. It’s a way of deepening our understanding of the faith – it helps us get a sense of how broad and weird and long this thing is. Again, in one sense, you could say that I’m not writing much original theological material. That’s true: I’m pulling weird books out of a dusty archive and pointing at some interesting passages. My work, my labour, is the part where I go down to the library and pull books at random off the shelf. The labour of writing those books and coming up with the ideas – that all belongs to someone else. I’m just telling you what they said.

Both of these examples illustrate that there’s really nothing wrong with working in an explicitly referential way – as promoters or curators, as explorers spelunking through the university basement. It’s a really important part of our sense of connectedness, especially in online environments. It’s easy for stuff on here to feel intangible. I don’t personally know any of the other writers cited on Critical Distance. I’ve read their stuff, but I don’t have a direct relationship. And my own writing – you know, I’m proud of it, but I also feel like it’s just posting on the internet. There’s a sense of unreality to the whole affair. I think it’s important for us to keep in view the material nature of the community. There are a finite, discrete number of nerds writing thoughtfully about video games online. It’s not endless, it’s a set number of historical, embodied creatures. Each of us exists in relation to each other, and in relation to the community of scholarship that precedes us. And we exist in relation to the people who will come after. This is maybe a weird crossover, but we’ve already talked about historical Christian thinkers, so I’ll lean in. In the 1947 book Dogmatics in Outline, the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth writes that we must never forget that we’ll be succeeded by “other, later men.” I’ll editorialize over the gendered language: “we who are faithful in this task will hope that those other, later people may think and say better and more profoundly what we were endeavouring to think and say.” He’s talking about dogmatics, but I think the principle applies. We exist in community. Our work stands in relation to that of the people around us, and it lays the foundation for the people who will come after. As writers, we enter into a living tradition. Our relationships to each other, the connections between our work – these things matter. If plagiarism is built on disconnect, on disregard for our peers, facilitated by the vanishing nowhere of the internet, then we must reaffirm those connections ourselves.