Boss Fight Books is an LA-based print publisher that releases monographs on video games. Their flagship (and only) series, also titled Boss Fight Books, is a series of 35 book-length studies of different video games, with books 36 and 37 (Outer Wilds and Dance Dance Revolution) slated for release later in 2025. Calling the titles ‘monographs’ is maybe slightly overstating the case – it’s a term I’m probably going to qualify and nuance and generally sort of back away from over the course of this essay. Typically a monograph is an academic text published by a qualified researcher working at a very high level. They’re very niche, highly specialised topics, sometimes emerging out of a PhD or a similar depth of research. What Boss Fight publishes is, so to speak, the video game version of a monograph. They’re a little shonky, a little informal, and sort of all over the place. It’s sort of like comparing a video game reviewer to Bob Woodward – they’re both technically journalists, but they’re not in the same league.

I’m being a little mean about the series, and I am going to say some nice things about it – but we sort of have to balance a few impulses here. It is, in the first instance, genuinely very exciting to have this series of books. We’re all agreed that games are art – we were talking about this at the start of last year, in Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction. It’s been a settled question for a decade. As games take their place as our sort of new artistic medium, it’s therefore natural to see monographs spring up around individual titles. It’s something we should expect, but it’s also something that comes with expectations. The monograph does typically have a level of associated prestige. It’s birthed out of rigorous scholarship and very high standards. It’s jarring, for instance, to find these faintly embarrassing editing errors throughout the volumes. Kyle Orland’s book on Minesweeper has the occasional extra word: “Cole, then a product manager on Microsoft’s operating system team, told me through an intermediary that it was ‘was such a long time ago, I really don’t remember anything'”. Nick Suttner’s Shadow of the Colossus, which we’ll talk about today, has Mono lying on an “alter”, instead of an altar. Matt Margini’s Red Dead Redemption (which is generally very good) has this strange insistence on capitalising words after colons? “But the results might be worth it: The system creates an impressive level of detail, giving a heaviness to every fall and footstep.” I don’t know why they’re doing that: when you use a colon in the middle of a sentence, it’s the same sentence, so you don’t need a new capital letter. You can capitalise if you’re leading into a quote, but not if it’s all the same sentence. Either way, if you are going to insist on extra capitals, you should probably use them consistently – which this book doesn’t. You can find examples where they revert back to lower case letters after colons for no discernable reason. “The game falls victim to a problem the Western has grappled with since the beginning of the genre: its inability to allow women to break out of stock types”. None of these are necessarily the writers’ fault – it’ll be mistakes on the part of the editor – but I shouldn’t be finding them in every book I read. The actual issues stemming from the writers are that they sometimes come across as a little glib or immature. Alex Kane’s Knights of the Old Republic makes these sweeping, bland statements: “Most artists struggle with some degree of imposter syndrome”. That volume, on how KotOR was made, concludes with a quote from one of the developers that again just suggests there’s not a particularly critical eye at play: “It was awesome.” The series as a whole is an important historical milestone, and it’s good to have this more accessible approach to monographs (with a range of titles that can be picked up by non-specialists), but let’s also note that the quality is variable.

The series’ reputation as being slightly uneven is also due to editorial direction, in that each title seems to take a radically different critical approach. Minesweeper and Knights of the Old Republic are both histories, covering how the game was made or the afterlife of its launch and its life in the community, in the case of Minesweeper. Red Dead Redemption is closer to classic literary criticism or film criticism, and Shadow of the Colossus I almost want to call an experiential criticism, in that it goes through each level of the game and critiques or analyses the game based on something in that level. Sometimes it talks about game design, sometimes it’s how the game teaches or reinforces mechanics, sometimes it’s theme or autobiography on why the game holds meaning for the author. It’s a genuinely very interesting approach, and entirely valid – and, the heart of what we’re talking about today, also potentially something that might not be well-received by the gaming audience at large.

Let’s step back and talk about criticism generally. One of the issues with video games is that we’re not dealing with a static text. When you read a book, we might all disagree about the meaning, but by and large we can agree on the words on the page. We all read the same words, and we can agree which ones come after which others. We all agree that Camus’ The Stranger opens “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” There are of course schools of thought that have a more complex view of reading (for example Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class?), and we should acknowledge as well that some seemingly stable texts, with the briefest inspection, very quickly unravel. For example, we don’t have Shakespeare’s original plays – for the most part, we have scripts compiled after the fact by actors, who each received written copies of their lines alone. We have probable versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Camus’ opening line I’ve also quoted in translation, in English rather than its original French – maybe another translation would be better, closer to the original. If we were to take a really serious critical look at it, we would be limited to talking about that specific translation – not really The Stranger, not truly or in its fundamental essence, but just one version. At the same time, while recognising that these more difficult texts exist, we can also recognise that a bunch of books or texts are actually comparatively quite stable. This essay in front of you exists in a relatively stable form. I might come back and fix a typo, if I spot any after launch (especially because I was dunking on the BFB editors earlier), but for the most part we can agree that it’s a relatively stable text. We’re all reading the same thing, and we can talk about it and critique it assuming that we’re all discussing essentially the same set of words in the same given order. With video games, that process is a lot harder. The experience of playing the game, the actual sounds and images on the screen, is usually going to be unique for each player.

We discussed some years ago Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, a war game where you play one of seven factions vying to control a planet. You adopt one of the factions, and fight off all the others. By the end of a full game of Dark Crusade, you have defeated six other factions, completing their respective stronghold missions (a longer, more complicated mission that eliminates them from the game). But you will be missing an experience of the seventh stronghold mission: your own. You obviously do not fight and defeat yourself. So in any game of Dark Crusade, there’s a gap between the complete range of material or content available in the game and the material that you will engage with in a single playthrough. The single experience is less than the totality of what’s on offer. Your view of the game is only partial, one path among many. So how do you approach criticism? How can you talk about the text when your experience of the text is different to the person next to you? If you start on one side of the map, and another critic starts on the other, you might experience the different maps and strongholds in reverse order. How can you talk about pacing in that context? How can you talk about the text in terms of anything other than your one specific playthrough? One approach is to try and talk about the text in a global way – without taking any one specific viewpoint, you can try and talk about the text as a totality. You might talk about mechanics that are experienced by every player – honour guard units or wargear or something. Another approach is to unashamedly adopt that first-person point of view – to talk about your subjective experience, to lean into the fact that every experience is ultimately just one person’s experience. That’s what Nick Suttner does with Shadow of the Colossus. Published in 2015, Suttner writes his way chronologically through the game. Each chapter of his book covers one of the sixteen bosses of Shadow of the Colossus, in order of encounter, plus a little bit of context at the start and end of the volume. In the fourth chapter, ‘A Giant Canopy Soars to the Heavens’, Suttner backtracks to where he killed the second Colossus, nicknamed Quadratus. “I find his body, or what’s become of it: a jagged, mossy pile of rocks, fused with the ground.” He talks more broadly about the play practice of going off track, or wandering around in the game: “I find it easy to get distracted in Shadow, despite always knowing roughly where to go and what to do next.” You can see immediately that this is experiential criticism – it’s from that first-person point of view, very much restricted to Suttner’s played experience of the game. Nobody is required to go back and see Quadratus again. Not everybody necessarily wanders around. It’s not bad criticism, it’s not wrong, but you can see how it operates overtly in that subjective mode. It’s a description of Suttner’s play experience rather than the sort of top-down comment on the structure of the game as a whole. Even its place in the argument: strictly, there’s no reason why Suttner has to talk about wandering in the fourth chapter of his book. It doesn’t have a necessary or inherent placement at this stage of the argument. It sits in direct contrast to the structure of Red Dead Redemption, say, which has a very disciplined organisation set around a set of themes – Territory, Frontier, Death, Cowboy, Violence, so on. Suttner adopts a critical method that he finds appropriate to his text. Shadow of the Colossus is a game about wandering, and so his critical method involves the same. It’s less of an argument and more a travelogue. It is subjective, because that’s the mode most appropriate to the text at hand. It wanders. The next chapter, ‘In the Land of the Vast Green Fields’, abruptly opens with “Let’s talk about horses.” Subjectivity in response to the individual variation of each player’s experience; wandering in response to Wander.

As a method it’s pretty solid, and it has a strong pedigree. We might refer back to books like Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, a biography about jazz greats that takes jazz as its method – that is, it takes famous stories about these jazz musicians, famous moments in their lives, and improvises around the facts that are known. It tells stories for which we don’t have evidence – it makes up the things people said to each other in private rooms or on the road. It’s jazz non-fiction, improvising around a theme. I think we talked about it when we were discussing Genesis Noir – anyway, that’s probably one of the more remarkable examples. Rachel Eisendrath’s Gallery of Clouds is another example, where disconnected topics and ideas are treated as ‘clouds’ in a meditation on Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. This practice of writing in a style that reflects the content of your study is a well-established model. It’s also an approach that pushes against some of the unhealthier critical tendencies in video games. You often see calls in this space for critics to be more ‘objective’, quote-unquote – often coming out of the right wing manosphere. There’s a rhetorical division drawn up between ‘facts’, so-called, and ‘politics’ or ‘ideology’. You have slogans like ‘keep your politics out of our games’, where the underlying premise is that games are politically neutral spaces invaded by ideologies or agendas like feminism or anti-racism. A similar rhetorical strategy is deployed in Australian politics with complaints about ‘the history wars‘ – in essence, whenever someone mentions the history of racial injustice in this country, a right wing politician will protest that he doesn’t want to be dragged into the history wars. It’s again that same rhetorical division – here we’re neutral, and over there they’re at war. They’re fighting over what history means, while we just want to very calmly and neutrally get on with our lives, which are definitely not involved in or conditioned by any of this history stuff. In a video game context this practice is similarly tied up in mechanisms like Metacritic, which take an average of all the scores doled out by different reviewers to give an average or ‘metascore’ – again, it’s sort of trying to iron out individual variation in favour of an aggregated (and therefore supposedly more objective) score.

To be clear, Metacritic is not necessarily a bad platform on its own merits, but it’s unfortunately drafted into this rhetorical practice that favours objectivity, or the appearance or façade of objectivity, over anything subjective and independent. It’s very much a function of the internet age, stripping out the thought and nuance of a string of reviews in favour of some blunt aggregated number – in retrospect it almost seems like an early incarnation of ChatGPT. The same rhetoric favours the interview over the critical analysis. It privileges the words of the developer as factual, objective, concrete – as based in observable history rather than interpretation and point of view. Obviously in reality these things are not mutually exclusive – any historian will tell you that it’s all interpretation and point of view – but in this rhetorical framing the two sides are constructed as being in opposition. It’s an extension of the ‘the curtains were fucking blue’ crowd.

That’s why you have these seeming anomalies like right wing Youtuber Jordan Owen trying to make a documentary about Sierra Entertainment. It seems like an odd pairing, but it’s the practical expression of that rhetorical construct. It’s the inside story, what the creators were really thinking. It’s the intentional fallacy treated as an anchor for meaning. Again, there’s obviously nothing wrong with interviews in themselves, or historical enquiry more broadly, but it is worth recognising how and why they’ll be drafted as superior methodologies by a particular sort of person. For his part, Nick Suttner simply rejects it. Not for him the global view, the god’s eye oversight of the game as a whole. He sets himself down on the ground, right over Wander’s shoulder, and he climbs.