There are still people in America who do not take video games seriously. These are the same people who question the relevance of hip-hop and assume newspapers will still exist in twenty-five years. It's hard to find an irrefutably accurate statistic for the economic value of the video-game industry, but the best estimates seem to be around $28 billion. As such, I'm not going to waste any space trying to convince people that gaming is important. If you're reading this column, I'm just going to assume that you believe video games in 2006 are the cultural equivalent of rock music in 1967, because that's (more or less) reality.

Okay!

So we all agree that video games are this consequential force, right? And we all assume that these games have meaning, and that they reflect the worldviews and sensibilities of their audience, right? And anyone who has played modern video games (or has even just been in the same room with someone who was playing) has undoubtedly noticed that games like Grand Theft Auto and Bad Day LA are visually transfixing, because the images are often beautiful and the movements of the characters are weird and hyperreal. Everyone seems to agree that all of these notions are true. Which prompts me to ask the following question: Why are there no video-game critics?

I realize that many people write video-game reviews and that there are entire magazines and myriad Web sites devoted to this subject. But what these people are writing is not really criticism. Almost without exception, it's consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It's expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself. There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing. And I'm starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice within the world of video games, which is interesting for a lot of reasons.

This is not a simple mystery to solve. It's hard enough to figure out why something does exist, but it's even harder to figure out why something doesn't exist. As an entry point, I contacted Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, one of the only mainstream books that comes remotely close to the kind of gaming criticism I just described. Johnson mostly attributes the void to mechanics. "Games can't be analyzed using the aesthetic tools we've developed to evaluate narrative art forms like books or films," he explained via e-mail. "Video games generally have narratives and some kind of character development, but--almost without exception--these are the least interesting things about them. Gamers don't play because they're drawn into the story line; they play because there's something intoxicating about the mix of exploring an environment and solving problems. The stories are an afterthought."

This is all completely true. However, I don't think it explains why video-game criticism doesn't exist. When someone reviews Moby Dick or Kramer vs. Kramer, they don't spend most of their time explaining the details of the plot (or at least they don't if they're interesting). The meaning of most art is usually found within abstractions. So the problem is not that video games don't have interesting narratives; the problem is that it's hard to decide what it is about video games that is interesting. "[We] need to talk about games in a way that is appropriate to the medium," says Johnson. "In some cases, they're closer to architecture."

Here again, Johnson is right. But there's one (rather obvious) difference between architecture and video games: Architecture is static. I live in a building that has fourteen floors, and that's always true. I can't manipulate the floor plan of my apartment or the number of bricks in the wall. What makes video-game criticism complex is that the action is almost never static. Unlike a film director or a recording artist, the game designer forfeits all autonomy over his creation--he can't dictate the emotions or motives of the characters. Every player invents the future.

Look at it this way: Near the end of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara asks Rhett Butler what she's supposed to do with the rest of her life, and he says that (frankly) he doesn't give a damn. Now, the meaning of those lines can be interpreted in many ways. However, what if that dialogue happened only sometimes? What if this scene played out differently for every person who watched Gone with the Wind? What if Rhett occasionally changed his mind, walked back into the house, and said, "Just kidding, baby"? What if Scarlett suddenly murdered Rhett for acting too cavalier? What if the conversation were sometimes interrupted by a bear attack? And what if all these alternative realities were dictated by the audience itself? If Gone with the Wind ended differently every time it was experienced, it would change the way critics viewed its message. The question would not be "What does this mean?" The question would be "What could this mean?"

That, I think, is where video-game criticism should be going: toward the significance of potentiality. Video games provide an opportunity to write about the cultural consequence of free will, a concept that has as much to do with the audience as it does with the art form. However, I can't see how such an evolution could happen, mostly because there's no one to develop into these "potentiality critics." Video-game criticism can't evolve because video-game criticism can't get started.

"It's weird that Entertainment Weekly doesn't have a video-game column, and that TheNew York Times only writes about gaming sporadically," says Henry Jenkins, a professor of comparative media at MIT and the author of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. "Aesthetic criticism exists in this industry, but only as arguments among gaming scholars and game creators. And the gaming industry suffers because of that. There is a very conservative element to gaming because absolutely everything is built around consumerism. Game designers are asking themselves questions about how a game should look and what it should do, but not about what the game is supposed to mean."

And that, ultimately, is why the absence of video-game criticism is a problem. If nobody ever thinks about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual, they'll all become strictly commodities, and then they'll all become boring. They'll only be games. And since we've already agreed that video games are the new rock music, we'd be facing a rather depressing scenario: This generation's single most meaningful artistic idiom will be--ultimately--meaningless.

There is a void, but there is still time to fill it. Somebody needs to become the first significant Xbox critic, stat. If nothing else, I'm sure he'll get rich.

Chuck Klosterman is the author of many fine books, including Chuck Klosterman IV which is available at your local bookstore or online, at BarnesAndNoble.com.

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