Getting Our Critical Bearings

Welcome to Critical Bearings, a place for critical engagement with the art form of Actual Play. I’m Esther, and I love Actual Play and media criticism.

My relationship with criticism began to take shape when I was in college and a beloved professor, an intellectual historian by profession, instilled in me the love of well-crafted critical questions. My love of media criticism really came into its own the first time I read Angelica Jade Bastién’s work in 2018. I don’t remember the exact topic of the piece, but I do remember the thrill I felt at the deft way she writes about and interrogates media, the way that her reviews dance with culture and personal meaning-making, the way she articulates whether a particular piece of art succeeds or fails at what it is trying to do. I remember thinking, I want to write like this, to form insights about story and craft on this level. Bastién helped me realize the scope of what a talented critic can do. Her work taught me that artistic criticism and critique does not exist merely to tear down, but rather to thoughtfully engage with art as it connects to our wider world (and to our inner worlds).

I had a similar moment with Andrea Long Chu in 2022, reading Otessa Moshfegh Is Praying For Us. My first reaction on reading this piece was damn, I both fear and long for the day that someone can so thoroughly build me up and destroy me in the space of a single essay. Chu’s work taught me that there is something so deeply satisfying about a good critic’s ability to use the themes in an artist’s body of work to reveal something about the artist themself, and about the audience, the culture, the time to which the art belongs. There is also something deeply satisfying about a good critic’s ability to heighten and expand our appreciation for art and methodically dissect the reasons why we find certain art disappointing.

Click into any comments section on a piece of critical writing and you will surely encounter the sentiment that the critic is merely a “hater.” People love accusing critics of being averse to fun, of taking things too seriously, of raining on the proverbial parade. If taking art seriously and pointing out its strengths and its faults is being a “hater,” then I will unashamedly drink of the haterade. (Perhaps someday I will write a whole piece in defense of taking things seriously, of those who are willing to be the rain on the parade.)

For now, I will say that when these accusations of critics as haters arise, I am always reminded of my studies of restorative justice, transformative justice, and Jewish understandings of moral repair. Many of my teachers have pointed out that when someone offers us a difficult critique or an account of harm done, it is a gift. The gift of honest feedback is an opportunity for us to come to a deeper understanding of ourselves on a personal and collective level, and to then engage in the fruitful work of change. When at its best, I believe the role of critic functions as a giver of this type of gift: the gift of a mirror held up to art and culture, of insight that compels us as individuals and collectives to question more deeply, understand more keenly, transform more fully.

I am also drawn to criticism because it speaks to not just to my inner “hater," but to the parts of me that are an unabashed lover.

I could also write an entire essay about why I love Actual Play, and maybe someday I will. For now, I think at the heart of my adoration are three loves: a love of actions that build communal trust; a love of the many different forms of intimacy shared between humans; and a love of the fractal nature of meaning-making as encoded in stories. For me, Actual Play weaves together the practices of trust, intimacy, and meaning-making as realized through storytelling. I love this.

I also love art. I love the human urge to make things, to fashion and create in a million different ways through a million different mediums. I love writing, language, the ways we craft sentences and communicate ideas. I love asking questions, and I love celebrating art that moves me. When at its best, I believe that the role of critic also functions as a lover proclaiming love and wonder at humanity’s ability to create meaning.

Lovers and haters alike now live in a time when we are facing immense pressure from corporations and governments to outsource our thoughts, feelings, and artistry to hallucinatory algorithms made in service of late-stage capitalism. In the age of generative AI, it feels necessary to be able to cogently communicate in our own words the reasons why we adore something or can’t stand it. It feels vital to form and share interesting, meaningful, and provocative questions about the nature of art and its relationship to life, culture, politics, religion, time, and so much more. I do not flatter myself that I am anywhere near as talented or practiced a critic as Bastién or Chu, but I have a yearning to publicly try my hand at the form.

I am starting this blog because I want to help create a thriving culture of criticism and critique within Actual Play as an artistic medium.

This is a controversial desire. In my time as an Actual Play artist and fan, I have met more than one person who ardently, earnestly opposes the idea of Actual Play critics. I have more than once encountered the sentiment that introducing criticism to the Actual Play ecosystem will invite people to simply be mean, and that this meanness will then have an impact on careers and personal wellbeing. There is a real fear that a culture of Actual Play media criticism will induce people not to operate as critics, but as bullies who are especially ready to target the most marginalized people in our spaces.

I understand the fear. There are certainly mean people and bullies within the art form of Actual Play and its fandoms. I myself have been a target of their ire on occasion. But I think that to give into this fear is cede ground to a much larger and more insidious problem. The mean people and bullies already exist right now, and in my experience, they are quite adept at using personal relationships, rumors, DMs, Discord servers, subtweets, etc. to manipulate public opinion and attempt to ruin reputations. It goes without saying that marginalized people bear the brunt of this. The problem is not something that will arrive due to more people trying their hands at AP criticism; it’s a problem that is already with us. Thus far, a dearth of Actual Play critics hasn’t prevented or fixed it.

Personally, I arrive at the conclusion that we should not shut down endeavors to create an ecosystem of critical thinking about Actual Play because of the possibility that some people who are already acting shitty might use criticism to continue to act shitty. We should also not shut down such endeavors because we fear that new shitty people may emerge. There are always going to be bullies. There are always going to be people who do harm. It’s on all of us in the scene to become more practiced at noticing the bullying, manipulation, and harm as it’s happening and to develop better systems for responding to harm. If anything, I believe that thoughtful criticism has a generative role to play in countering bullying and meanness in our space.

As Actual Play artists, we take an inherent risk in creating for the public. Once our art is out in the world, people will have their own responses to it. We can’t control what those responses are. But in the care of a thoughtful critic, criticism can be a boon to us as artists. It can help us celebrate the moments when our art lands just as intended, aid us in identifying and honing the areas where we shine. It can likewise help us understand the ways in which our art isn’t landing as we’d hoped, the rough edges of artistry that we can keep finessing. It can expose our biases, the flaws in a piece of art that we may not be able to grasp on our own. It can be a powerful tool for learning and growth, if we let it. 

That is not to say there are no risks or pitfalls associated with Actual Play criticism. There is certainly the possibility that a critic will use a platform to be intentionally mean, or that that they will make thoughtless mistakes. But truthfully, my greatest fear when it comes to AP criticism is the risk of hegemonic critical perspectives. 

There are spaces out there right now that are dedicated to discussing AP, several of which have been recommended to me over the years as “the best” place to go to share in thoughtful conversations about the art and craft of Actual Play. I’m not going to name names, but to put it plainly, the spaces recommended to me as having “the best” AP discussions consistently come across to me as spaces where the tone and tenor of conversations are set and defined by white people.

I know people are probably going to light me up for saying that, but it’s my honest impression. That is not to say there are only white people in those spaces that have been recommended to me, or that there is nothing generative or important coming out of them! But when I watch who dominates conversations in these forums and whose knowledge, positions, and expertise are deferred to... there's a pattern.

I know my own kind (white people), and I do think it’s mighty interesting which perspectives the white people most visibly engaged in the study and public discussion of Actual Play tend to elevate. It's telling to notice who gets cited, whose art is shouted out, who benefits culturally and financially from the work, and what risks are taken publicly and privately to push back against whiteness in the field.

I was once advised by a prominent white person in AP studies to “keep my powder dry for the fights that matter” when it comes to critiquing cultures of white supremacy in ttrpg spaces, right before that person stopped speaking to me because of my role in the Big Bad Boycott. If I’m honest, I was hurt and angry at the time, but with distance that hurt and anger has transformed into gratitude. I’m grateful because that moment was a powerful lesson for me. It was a reminder that when fame, connections, money, and career growth are on the line, surface-level commitments to stated values often melt away in favor of silence and complicity. It has made me extremely mindful of whose work on Actual Play is elevated, disseminated, and celebrated, and why. And it has made me more committed than ever to attending to the intersections of criticism and justice work, and to critically engaging with art made by marginalized people operating with relatively few material resources.

It is my intention that this blog will become a home for a number of critical voices from a wide variety of backgrounds and lived experiences. It is my hope that this will be a space where Actual Play is taken seriously and where its artistic, cultural, and personal meanings are considered carefully and placed in conversation with other art, culture, politics, religion, theories, ideas, etc. I don't intend for this blog to be a dunk-fest, but a place where art is celebrated, interrogated, and appreciated.

I also hope that this will in time become a home for writing about game design and other topics in the wider field of ttrpgs. And I would encourage you to support other voices writing and speaking critically about AP, including Amaan's AP review series on YouTube, Ciera/Panda’s Patreon-based writings on AP criticism and the Actual Play review-based web fest I founded, Intrepid Web Fest.

I hope that the writing you read here will spark a desire to think critically, to love Actual Play more deeply, to write your own reviews or criticism, to ask critical questions and, as Rilke says, live your way into critical answers. 

Practicalities