Clive James was an Australian poet and media critic who made his name writing television criticism for The Observer. He – how do you describe Clive James? – he was a wonderful stylist who spent a lot of time putting fancy wrapping on terrible ideas. He said he was left-wing, but supported the invasion of Iraq. In 2017, he engaged in climate denial for a conservative thinktank (“The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end”). Similar hijinks can be found in A Point of View, a collection of his mid-2000s radio talks on current affairs – I seem to remember him complaining a great deal about the concept of having a recycling bin? He was against recycling bins – PC gone mad or something. In the same book, he wished Tolkien and Lewis would have strangled each other so that the fantasy genre wouldn’t exist. He’s a very well-read wanker.

I’m currently re-reading his 2007 Cultural Amnesia, a series of digressions that start with historical figures and go in all sorts of directions. In his chapter on Louis Armstrong, he says that white jazz players don’t get enough respect: “Jim Crow in reverse.” His takeaway from the black Marxist historian C.L.R. James is that “the Third World … should learn from the First” – oh, and he doesn’t care for ‘they’, and can’t be bothered with ‘he or she’, so he reverts to the singular ‘he’ as the default pronoun for a person of indeterminate gender. He also seems to pair French critical theorists alongside the 9/11 hijackers as enemies of society? “From within as well as without, the Procrustean enemies of our provokingly multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our own airliners into towers of commerce.” He names “those with a vested interest in offering us a progressive unintelligibility” in his essay on Marc Bloch: “Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida et hoc genus“. He’s got a whole essay on Walter Benjamin where he claims that Benjamin writes in a difficult way to disguise his thin ideas. “There is no arguing against all-inclusive obscurity except to say that the whole thing means nothing, which few of us dare to do.” I share some of the concerns about Benjamin’s style, but for James it’s a full-blown liberal plot.

Despite that, James remains a compelling read, as long as you ignore everything he says and thinks. I honestly find him most useful as a sort of bibliography. I’m compelled by the pitch for Cultural Amnesia: a series of short essays using historical figures as a starting point for reflections on a theme. I could read that forever – easily for the mere 800 pages making up the actual book. A bunch of the names were new to me as well. James introduced me to Peter Altenberg, Stefan Zweig, Nadezhda Mandelstam – I have a copy of Hope Against Hope on his recommendation, and he even prompted me to try and learn German, purely for the joy of reading in another language. And I think he’s right to be worried about the decline of the arts, and corresponding declines in media literacy or critical reading skills. He phrases it as cultural amnesia – the forgetting of thinkers and writers, the forgetting of history, not only on a personal level but at the level of society. It’s a crucial message for the evolving culture of video game criticism.

Gaming, as a culture, is very much about the next new thing. It’s about the next generation of consoles, about the upcoming sequel (even when it’s just more of the same). We don’t spend a lot of time looking back, and when we do, it’s often only for the purpose of making-new again. The concept of the remaster or remake is exactly this: a making-new, refreshing a game by bringing it in line with modern day graphics or hardware. We honour these games by giving them the newness we remember from the first time round. Of course, the joke with remakes is that they’re about modernizing older games, but they in turn are doomed to become just as old as the original titles. BioShock was originally released in 2007, and in 2016 it was remastered. That remaster is not a new game any more. It came out in the same year as Pokemon Go. It’s already aged – and by 2040, there won’t be any perceptible difference between the two versions of BioShock. They’ll both just be old. Gaming culture is about the new. It’s not very good at remembering what came before. That’s part of a broader trend of forgetfulness, of cultural amnesia. We can’t stand for that.

Batman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure game from Rocksteady Studios. The third in the Arkham trilogy, it released to slightly wobbly reviews: the PC release had technical issues, everybody hated the Batmobile, and the supposedly new character of the Arkham Knight turned out to be a minor reframing of an existing character from the comics. It was, even so, a strong ending to the Rocksteady trilogy. It’s a game about failure, about the mistakes that haunt us and about how far we’ll go to do better. It’s about self-destruction, selfishness, family. I’ve been writing about Arkham Knight and the Arkham games for about eight years now – since BioShock Remastered came out. It’s not new, and it’s not having any particular sort of cultural moment, but it’s part of our heritage. In his essay on Charlie Chaplin, Clive James writes that while the sciences progress, the humanities accumulate. “A humanist has no choice: he must revisit the history of the humanities all the time, because it is always alive, and can’t be superseded.” Video game criticism sits in the wake of James’s TV criticism (would a ‘they’ really have killed him?), and in the wake of literary criticism for generations before that. We can’t help but look back – we must look back, and keep looking back. I’m going to talk about the Arkham games until I fucking die, and you should too.