Towards a Critical Commons
May 12, 2026
I
There are a few thoughts on my mind about games criticism this week.
There has been discourse, dreaded discourse, on the Posting Sites, about a few games, some very new, some quite old. I don't know the play-by-plays because I am firmly retired from the likes of BlueSky and its ilk, but the summaries have been bad enough. And I think all of you (readers, writers, folks who inhabit this nebulous space of games criticism with me) know it. There's a shared understanding of, oh, this ain't it.
That shared understanding, as it progresses towards self-recognition and self-reflection, is a start towards something better. Autumn Wright had a timely, concise response, imploring folks to engage more deeply and thoughtfully by committing to their arguments "In the CMS. With hyperlinks. One blog at a time."
But this is not a new call. Steven Santana has been on this beat for a while, and has walked the walk both with article-length responses to specific pieces of writing and in compiling an extensive resource of games writers and writing, all for the purpose of promoting greater dialogue.
This is also one of Critical Distance's guiding principles. Long ago and far away, founder Ben Abraham noticed that there was a lot of blogging out there by folks interested in critical engagement with games, but not a lot of dialogue between bloggers. Critical Distance was founded to help centralize the reading and help put writers in conversation with one another.
II
A little while back, I made an adjustment to the format I use for Critical Distance's This Week In Videogame Blogging by adding a new element. In addition to the new articles featured each week, I would include links to articles from prior issues of TWIVGB. Each of these "back catalogue" links would be tied specifically to a new article, and I hoped that this would help promote larger, more interconnected conversations. I called this little feature "Critical Connections".
Within the week of my introducing this new element, I received feedback from a writer who expressed discomfort with the implication that their work was in dialogue with other articles they might not have read in the first place. They expressed a wish to change the wording of this element to something more neutral than "Critical Connections".
I acquiesced to this request and renamed the element to "Further Reading", because, like, why do I want to go out of my way to make a writer uncomfortable? Ultimately, a name change of this sort has little bearing on my intentions for the idea, which is simply to encourage folks to read a second article on a topic that might be of interest to them.
This writer is not someone I have ever been in any kind of regular direct communication with, so I can't presume anything about their feelings beyond what they put in their written request. Nonetheless, I have been thinking in a more general way about makes a games critic apprehensive about their work being treated as something in dialogue with the work of others, whether they are intentional in or even aware of that dialogue or not.
Some of the immediate conclusions are rather obvious. Gamergate went a long way towards making all of us (see: white people who had not heretofore taken material threats to their person as just a fact of being visible on the Internet) a lot more distrustful and afraid of one another. Even when the stakes aren't quite so existential, the same social media platforms most of us relied on to find our audiences and one another in the first place have only gotten more efficient at stripping our words of context and nuance and making one-upmanship a neverending bloodsport.
So yes, I can see why a writer would hesitate to have their work invoked as part of a conversation that they don't have control over and didn't sign off on. I get it.
Siloing, however, is not the answer, and in the long run benefits nobody.
III
Yet siloing is not just an individual problem: it has become a structural one in the space. Over the last few years, more and more of the big games press sites have alternately laid writers off, made their jobs more miserable and less liveable, or closed up shop entirely. The response to this bloodletting has been for those writers to band together and found various "worker-owned" independent publications, most of which operate on more-or-less the same kind of subscription model where some or all of the writing on the site requires paid membership.
I think the worker-owned model, in its current form and prevalence, is bad. I want to stress that I do not have beef with any writer or group of writers just trying to get their bread and eke a living from their trade. This model is a response to a failure of the previous model of corporate-owned, advertisement-driven publishing, and brings with it new problems.
My friend Kaile Hultner got into some of this a little while back. This model really only works at all if you already had your audience--if you already had your foot firmly in the door of games press before private equity came in and took the door off its hinges. This does nothing to solve the generational problem in the space, where younger, less established, and less secure writers have been squeezed out of the industry first and what we're left with--whether at the old commercial mastheads or the new independent ones--are the oldheads.
A number of the worker-owned pubs have made space on their sites for new talent, and they deserve kudos for that. But by-and-large, this remains a personality-driven model, and the readers are loyal to those personalities.
The biggest problem, however, at least in my view, is that paywalled writing cannot be read, shared, discussed, or responded to without all involved parties buying in. It is siloed. If people are having conversations about that writing at all, it is probably happening on the individual publication's members-only Discord server, and if those conversations are breaking containment in any way, they are doing so in the fragementary telephone game kind of way that fuels Poster's Discourse.
IV
A few years back, essayist Kastel wrote a piece that has lingered in my mind about a game called Common'hood. To briefly summarize the game, a woman named Nikki loses her home and from there kind of fails upward into a commons community, making lots of mistakes along the way. To briefly summarize the essay, Kastel is interested in the game's awareness and articulation of the difficulty of defining a commons in the first place, and that the only way we get closer to a working understanding of the idea, one that works for all, is through dialogue.
I myself don't have an ironclad definition of what a commons is, or what it looks like. I might call it the idea of holding something--a resource--in shared collective ownership, for the equal benefit of everyone.
I think we should treat games criticism as a shared resource, one where we all have access and all receive its benefits. A Critical Commons.
Games criticism has probably never truly had a commons. The enthusiast magazines of the 80s and 90s weren't one. The commercial sites that followed weren't and aren't one. Academia isn't one, even if specific journals like Game Studies and ROMchip are open-access (good). Twitter and BlueSky sure ain't it.
I think writers like Autumn and Steven, and projects like Critical Distance, work towards bringing us closer to a Critical Commons. But I also believe, quite strongly, that the contemporary worker-owned model, at least in its most ubiquitous form, drives us in the opposite direction.
So I'm going to conclude this article with a call. If you're part of one of these worker-owned collectives, hi. I've read your stuff. You have some very good work. But if it's paywalled, I've stopped sharing it on Critical Distance because while I do see the value of your work, I don't see the value in circulating writing only your customers can read.
I know you need to make a living. You deserve to make a living. But once you've made your buck, give the article to the public. Un-paywall it, and re-circulate it.
I'll be very forthcoming that I don't know what that looks like in implementation. Maybe it's a month. Maybe it's six. I don't know, I'm not keeping your books. It's possible some of you are doing this already and it has escaped my notice. But it's not the norm. Not yet.
If you are at one of these sites, I will comfortably bet that you are more sick of this week's discourse than I am, because part of your livelihood is to stare straight at it. I think un-paywalling your legacy articles after a grace period will help promote the longer-form conversations that Autumn and Steven, and a whole lot more people that I didn't cite today have been begging us to have. I still don't know what a commons is, but I believe that treating games criticism as a public, shared good can only benefit us all.
I will sign off with a quote from Kastel's essay.
"If commoning is to be taken seriously, then it must challenge the ontological assumptions of property. Otherwise, leftists may be prone to enacting another form of settler colonialism, just dressed in more radical language."
References
Abraham, Ben. "An oral history of videogame blogging." Critical Proximity, 16 Mar. 2014, https://critical-proximity.com/2014/03/16/an-oral-history-of-videogame-blogging/.
Hultner, Kaile. "The Spectacular Leviathan Part II." No Escape, 23 May, 2025. https://noescapevg.com/the-spectacular-leviathan-part-ii/.Kastel. "Common'hood: Figuring Things Out Together." Minidoshima, 4 Dec. 2022, https://kastelpls.substack.com/p/commonhood-figuring-things-out-together.
Santana, Steven. "A Reading Manifesto." Steven's Substack, 7 Nov. 2025, https://breakingarrows.substack.com/p/on-culture-missive-november-2025.
---. "Games Writing Resource." Google Docs, 7 Aug. 2025, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nbDhs78Na52rz5q2UoIpvmH7-nJ4TA3UO87BH5RI5RA/edit?tab=t.0.
Wright, Autumn. "What are we doing? What's going on?" Autumn Wright, 11 May 2026, https://autumn-wright.com/just-blog-it/.