Chris Franklin is a video game critic who runs the YouTube channel Errant Signal, a mid-sized channel with 174,000 subscribers that’s been operating since 2012. Among other things, he’s made a pretty good video on The Spaces Between, a lo-fi surreal horror game with PS1 aesthetics. It was included in the extremely large itch.io bundle a few years back, and – anyway, it’s a good game, and Franklin had a good run at it. I’m sort of annoyed I didn’t make something about it myself. About eight months ago, Franklin wrote a short reflective piece on social media platform Cohost, where he spoke about the conflicting pressures governing his work and the toxic role of money in video games and video game criticism more broadly. Titled ‘Overthinking What It Means to Make Things on The Internet Again’, it’s a thousand words on the tension between curation and criticism, and how both of those functions are threatened by the bottom line. Criticism is hard and time-consuming, and for games with smaller audiences, he suggests, the payoff often isn’t worth the effort. He finds curation videos easier to make. If the point is ‘hey, this game is cool,’ it’s easier to throw together a script and fire out a video, supporting those smaller games by publicizing their existence without all the effort of a critical assessment. The tension, of course, is that curation feels like free marketing. It’s not rewarding work for a critic.

I should say off the bat that Franklin exhibits some anxiety about his own status as critic. In ‘Overthinking’ he describes his critical self as “the hoity toity pretentious dude who tries to treat games as capital ‘a’ Art”. In his Patreon description, he describes his work making videos on game criticism as “even more pretentious than it sounds,” and he titles milestones or anniversary videos with names like ‘Introspective Narcissism’. Even the Cohost piece is described as overthinking – as if it’s too much thought, somehow excessive or inappropriate, rather than a perfectly normal amount of critical self-reflection. It’s meant to be self-deprecating, but – I don’t know, I just want to see him be proud of his work. It’s good stuff. It’s not hoity toity to think about themes in art, and if we want to insist on the value of criticism, we have to cultivate an atmosphere of dignity and respect, which starts with our attitude to our own writing.

Part of Franklin’s anxiety is also due to the way money influences video game criticism. At the start of his post, he identifies financial incentives as significant and sometimes even determinative in which games get covered. “Because of their limited audience, there is little financial motive to cover smaller titles by most outlets until they become surprise mega-hits.” He describes how these financial motives influence his own creative choices: “that lack of an audience is a problem when good criticism takes so much work.” Deep videos on less popular games are “tremendous effort for very little reward … that kind of video comes with a cost”. That ‘cost’ is clearly financial – it’s views, ads, brand awareness. It’s a line of thought that’s taken me some time to digest. This random social media post has been sitting in my notes for six months now – I’ve not really known what to do with it. At first I was frustrated by the idea of needing financial reward to do criticism. It felt dismissive of the intrinsic reward, or even the extrinsic value of engaging with and building up the culture of video games. In ‘Objectivity and the Shrinking Self’, collected in his 1972 book of essays Other Criteria, art critic Leo Steinberg writes that “Art is cherished, or it does not survive.” He explains: “A succession of value judgements, embodied in acts of neglect or preservation, largely determines what we receive from the past.” If we steer away from making those judgements because there’s not enough financial return, we let money determine for us what we do and don’t preserve. We defer to each game’s marketing budget. That seems in opposition to the very core of what criticism is about. After letting some time go by, I think my view has become a bit more nuanced. Franklin is obviously in a very different space to me. He’s making videos rather than writing essays, so he has additional costs – for video editing software, recording setup, that sort of thing. Videos take longer to produce, so there’s more of a time commitment. He’s also sitting on the cusp of financial viability. He has a reasonable audience, and the idea of doing that job full-time must feel tantalizingly close. The money question is more pressing when it potentially makes up a meaningful part of your income. I still struggle with how terms like ‘reward’ and ‘motive’ are largely conceptualised along financial lines, but I also feel like I better understand where that’s coming from.

I guess the broader question is whether critics should get paid – not whether they ought to be paid in an ideal world, but whether they should expect payment as a realistic outcome from this type of work. In the preface to Other Criteria, Steinberg talks about how contemporary art in the 50s was mostly ignored by art historians: “practicing art critics were mostly artists or men of letters. Few art historians took the contemporary scene seriously enough to give it the time of day.” That’s not an era with a great social or economic infrastructure for getting paid to write about modern art. Similarly, in Susan L. Greenberg’s Editors Talk about Editing, there’s a interview with Evan Ratliff, who co-founded the magazine Atavist. “People always ask, is this model working? But the model never worked; it was never easy to make money as a freelance writer. Everyone’s cobbling together different ways of making it work. There’s no golden age when people made amazing wages by being freelance writers.” Across different forms and time periods, tastes change, but the pay stays roughly the same. Some types of art don’t get a lot of coverage – they’re not necessarily prestigious, and there isn’t always the infrastructure to support a full-time job. Even where there are avenues to financial return, they’re not universally accessible. In his ten year retrospective, Franklin looks sideways at channels of a similar age that have garnered more success – particularly the Game Theorists and Red Letter Media. He talks about how he still sort of expects his channel to blow up: “There’s still a part of me that keeps thinking this is the ‘before’ part of the show’s history, where I’m putting in my dues.” He talks about waiting to go viral, waiting to “get there”, before concluding that it’s probably not going to happen: “This is it.” It’s a process of grieving, but also coming to accept the reality of his work, and maybe finding value in it beyond the dream of making bank or becoming a famous YouTuber.

And that’s really the question, isn’t it. If we accept that money isn’t going to rain from the sky, where do we place value or meaning in this work? We were talking recently about Clive James, the Australian poet and critic. He wrote about writers like they were friends – and many of them were, but that tone remains even when he’s writing about eighteenth century essayists like William Hazlitt. “Hazlitt’s comprehensive grasp of contingent reality had a lot to do with his capacity for self-examination: his emotional life, for example, was a succession of disasters about which he had the courage to come clean, at least in part.” It’s virtually chummy. It takes in the life at a glance. “Hazlitt got better as he got older, his powers of reflection having more of his own experience on which to reflect.” Partly because games are so often communal efforts – more akin to film than the novel in terms of the scale of production – we don’t really get to talk about individual creatives in that way. Video games also just aren’t old enough. We can’t pop back a couple hundred years to find an underappreciated game designer, or an unrecognised critic. That’s us. We are the couple hundred years ago. Assuming these fuckers don’t burn the planet down, people will be checking to see what was made – what was written – back in the 21st century. They’ll see that a lot of us weren’t getting paid, but I don’t think that will take away from the power of what we’ve written.