The post-game discussion is one of the most interesting and valuable parts of game night to me. It’s important to me to reflect on the experience, to articulate it and in that way process it. Both on an emotional level as well as gaming-wise. What happened? Why did it happen? How did the game contribute to my experience, and how can it be explained by the way it played out? To me these are important and valuable questions that turn a game into something more than just a trivial competition to pass the time.

Still, I often have the impression that these conversations sometimes stay very superficial, even though the game itself wasn’t. Most people seem to know what they expect from a game. But they don’t always have the means to put these expectations into words. Naturally, they reach for the kind of language and vocabulary that seems appropriate to them:

“fun”
“interaction”
“balance”
“winning”
etc.

There is nothing wrong with these terms. Using them is not a mistake. Even though, they are often imprecise. But what’s worse: they’re not always appropriate. But if all you have is a hammer, you look at every problem as a kind of nail. If we only ever use a fixed set of terms and concepts to understand a game, we will eventually run into one, that offers an experience that our terms can’t adequately or meaningfully describe.

In my last game of Betrayal at House on the Hill somebody criticized that during the game players can get eliminated, forcing them to “watch the game from the sidelines”. That is an accurate description of how the game usually plays out. But I wouldn’t consider it a weakness of the design. Of course it’s frustrating to be eliminated, if you expected to be part of the game’s action until the very last turn. But is this expectation always warranted?

I feel similarly about complaints when a game doesn’t offer the option to change another player’s turn. Some like to mockingly observe, that it is irrelevant if you played this game alone or with five other players. This point is also rooted in an expectation that a game should allow players to cause such changes. And again, you have to ask yourself, if this must apply to all games. Or think of the criticism, that a game’s random elements are too strong, making strategic play impossible.

These and many other criticism are build on expectations we bring to the table. Inexperienced players in particular rarely question them or reflect on them. This usually leads to them remaining hard to grasp, and by extension difficult to compare to whatever the game actually offers or makes possible.

This now, is where game criticism can shine. By which I don’t just mean published opinions and reviews of games, but also the afore-mentioned post-game discussions. These are the places in which we critically engage with our experience playing the game and the features of the game itself. It is criticism’s responsibility to find means and ways to articulate what we have experienced. Critical engagement with a game doesn’t simply cover the rules, theme and components. It is, above all, a critical interrogation of our own experience with the game. One that is personal and deserves to be expressed in our own words.

This doesn’t need to be a fancy new comparison, a new metaphor or even a new turn of phrase. But it also shouldn’t rely on the same old concepts and ideas we already have. Because that is how we devalue our own capability of critically engaging our media. It becomes an uninspired ticking off of the same old points of criticism. We inevitably limit our own perspective on the medium this way. Because we only have a small handful of concepts with which to grasp what we’ve played. It’s as if we judged all films based on how tense they were, how many action scenes they had, whether image and sound were always clean and crisp and whether the story had a happy ending.

(This is usually the point, where it’s suggested that all this is a question of personal preference, and that there’s no accounting for taste. I hope you understand that I have no interest in indulging these kinds of thought-terminating cliché and simply move on.)

Of course, you could evaluate a lot of films based on these criteria. But just as many would fall through the cracks. Films, that are different and want to have a different effect on their audience, would be hard to understand or describe. Without meaning to, we would shut ourselves off from new ideas and experiences. Games can be an individual and unique experience. But they can only be that way, if we allow ourselves to be open to them and give them room for their uniqueness. To do this, we should use our own approach, our own perspective and our own language to describe what we’ve actually experienced.