Concepts for Videogame Criticism

As I try and make sense of why I like the games I like, I find myself coming back to some ideas again and again. Once an idea gets stuck in my head, I start applying it to all the games I play. I start treating those ideas as “concepts for criticism”, and I occasionally get round to writing them up on this blog.

I’ve tagged a few posts like that now, so I decided to gather them together in one place. In the title menu now is a link to my “Concepts” page. This lists the ideas that have become common themes on 9pp along with links to the posts that discuss them.

It isn’t a glossary of videogame terms, or some kind of universal reference tool. Instead, it’s a way to organise some of what I’ve written, and a way to browse by subject, instead of just the big long list of everything on the browse page.

One of the reasons I’m not calling it a “glossary” is that putting things in a glossary is a little too much like carving them in stone, and I’d like to be able to abandon these ideas as soon as I stop finding them useful.

Some of the concepts I made up myself; some I didn’t. Some may come confusingly close to other terms I don’t know about, or even ones I do know about, or even ones I also made up myself. Sorry about that — this is a document of what I’ve written so far, not of my conclusions having written it. 

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