“Your audience watches because you can explain what everything means and tell them why this thing is so important faster than anyone else”
“In Pokémon fandom, there is Joe Merrick.
Merrick runs Serebii.net, one of the largest Pokémon fan sites in the world. When a new game releases, the expectation is that the site will catalog everything as quickly as possible. The race is to know first. Serebii knows first”
“This is the ultimate Pokémon fan. It would be ridiculous to suggest anyone understands Pokémon better than him. You can find the answer to any question on Serebii dot net”
“This is what it means, now, to “understand” a game. Because once a text becomes something to be cataloged, there is no longer any room to encounter it. Only to extract from it. The game stops being a place you move through and becomes a container of information to be emptied”
“In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag describes a mode of criticism that treats art as something to be translated into a set of meanings that can be extracted and explained, and she argues that this does not deepen our engagement with a work so much as replace the experience of it with a method for handling it. “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’””
“an approach to art that prioritizes what can be said about it over what it feels like to be inside it”
“In games, that shift is everywhere: a Pokémon becomes a set of stats, a battle becomes a question of optimization, a story moment becomes sanded down into what it is “really about.””
“It is difficult to say where these feelings fit within the structures that dominate how we talk about games online”
“Wikis cannot host this kind of experience, because it cannot be extracted into memorized trivia. YouTube essays, meanwhile, tend to organize themselves around creators presenting their playthroughs as correct accounts of what the game is, which leaves little room to dwell on something this private without breaking the illusion that the insight is obvious, something the audience has arrived at on its own—or worse, inviting the familiar correction that it “isn’t that deep.””
“You do not need to walk along Bleak Beach or notice the way the buildings collapse into the earth or feel the strange compulsion to restore the world to order. In fact, playing the game only gets in the way of this kind of understanding, because it introduces too much that cannot be easily extracted”
“Once a game is understood primarily as a collection of answers, everything inside it begins to reorganize itself around that assumption”
“Once a game has been converted into a series of answers, the demand for answers begins to escalate. It is no longer enough to know where something is or how it works. The search extends outward, into developer interviews, behind-the-scenes material, and even unreleased or datamined information, as though the work itself were no longer sufficient to sustain attention”
“Shigeru Miyamoto describes a similar movement when he talks about the pursuit of hidden secrets in games. “When pornography escalates, it eventually crosses into the grotesque,” he says. “It’s reached a point where it isn’t measured by common sense anymore. It’s just people getting bored and looking for stronger and stronger stimulation. We’ve hit a wall.””
“the experience of the game is reorganized around that demand. Not what is here, but what can be extracted from it. Not what it feels like to move through a place, but what can be said about it once you leave. At a certain point, there is nowhere left to go. This is the wall Miyamoto is describing—the loss of the ability to encounter art”
“Susan Sontag names the alternative more directly. “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.””
“The problem is not that we have failed to understand these works, but that we have understood them too quickly, too completely, in ways that leave nothing behind”
““In place of a hermeneutics,” she writes, “we need an erotics of art.””