It’s hard to be critical without becoming a curmudgeon. There’s a natural process that occurs: I have an opinion about a game or other work. Someone disagrees with that opinion. To defend my opinion, I restate it in new terms, I build on it, I elucidate it and iterate upon it. Two results arise from this: One, my opinion slowly develops into a well-practiced rant; two, when I uncan this rant, over and over, to make my case, I steadily build up a negative association with the thing I was ranting about.
Opinions, restated, grow bigger and broader. “I liked it but it had flaws” becomes “It had serious problems” becomes “I hate that stupid bullshit game”, by a process that’s hard to fight once it begins. This is not solely the domain of negative opinions: If you like a game enough to defend it when other people are attacking it, that, too, makes it take on an outsized significance as something good and precious, far beyond the work’s original impact. The effort spent arguing and justifying a viewpoint melts into time spent attacking or defending a work – and, after all, why would you spend all your time defending it if it wasn’t wonderful? Why would you spend all of your time attacking it if it wasn’t terrible?
All of which circles the drain of the big idea, which is this: You can’t criticize an experience you have had without changing that experience. The same way casting enough light on an experiment to see its outcome might change that outcome, examining an experience closely, dissecting what works for you and what doesn’t, putting that into words, these all leave a mark. The very act of remembering, of interpreting your past, reshapes that memory like fingerprints on a wax cylinder.
This is not a bullet you can dodge. This is not a problem you can solve. This is what it means to have a memory and to form an opinion; this is what it means to discuss art with others. And it is, more often than not, beneficial: Making and hearing critical arguments can bring parts of the work that seemed extraneous and limp suddenly to life, to awaken with meaning. Even the harshest criticism cannot be made without implying the existence of a better way, and this too can help us appreciate art in new ways.
Still, there’s a part that always wants to go back. We might wish for a purer experience, one that belongs to us wholly alone. We may miss, sometimes, being the person we used to be, being carefree or naive or even foolish, and the way that that allowed us to experience life. But the you who misses that now is the same you who sees things differently now; were you to go back, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the fulfillment of the longing you now feel, it would merely be just the way things are for you, and probably the way you would then always expect them to be.
Critical insight becomes part of us. Once you learn how to play piano, you can’t listen to a sonata the same way again. Once you learn how games are made, you won’t be able to play a game the same way again. Every time you learn something new, you become a new person, angled by degrees away from the trajectory you once occupied.
It hurts. Growth tends to.
It’s helpful, though, to be aware of your critical process. To witness your opinion forming, to construct your arguments with intent, to be aware of your justifications calcifying. To forge ahead without this insight is to allow your beliefs to be shaped not by what you find good or beautiful or just, but merely by how strenuously those beliefs are opposed by others.
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