Ah, October. That time of year when you realise you’re never going to finish all of those resolutions you made in January. The month when you open long-forgotten lists of unfinished work and see articles with a deadline of ‘December 2012’ on them. You delete those items and go for a walk instead because CRUNCHY CRUNCHY LEAVES.
This autumn doesn’t just mark the end of a year: for games consoles, it’s the end of a generation (those who play games on a PC can excuse themselves for the rest of the paragraph). The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will be launched imminently, which is great because it will drastically reduce the price of PS3 games. Seriously folks, I got a PS3 last year and they’re great! You don’t need a PS4.
Before the mainstream games websites publish their inevitable hyperbolic link-bait “Top 10 Games of the Generation” lists, let’s get the drop on them. Yet instead of writing a mundane list of games, let’s do something better – something with real meaning.
October’s Blogs of the Round Table theme is Game Changers.
Some games are great because they are technically excellent; others because they change the way we play games; others because they change the world around us.
You have been commissioned to choose a videogame for an upcoming museum exhibit. You can choose any game released from November 2005 until the present day, on any hardware. Choose the most important game, or just pick your favourite. What’s your Game Changer?
For a writing stimulus, I suggest your shelves, your Steam account and your soul. We’ll be accepting articles until the end of November: the game selection will be immortalised on Critical Distance, so try and capture why exactly you chose your game. You can write a review, retrospective or even a broader piece about the wider cultural context surrounding the game. Be bold!
You can see the current submissions here:
Use this code to embed the links in your blog:
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Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @AGBear with the #BoRT hashtag.
Rules of the Round Table
- Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
- This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, I’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
- Your duty as a knight of the round table is to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece, to give them a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going.
- Your blog does not have to be in English. If you submit a German piece I’ll try my best to read it; if it’s another language I’ll find someone else.
- If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start. Use your common sense.
- You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.
A Brief Guide to the Linkomatic
A few folks have had trouble embedding the BoRT Linkomatic on their blog, so here are a few pointers:
- Rich-text editors tend to strip out HTML iframes. You should switch to an HTML editing mode before you paste the Linkomatic code into your blog.
- WordPress.com and some other blogging platforms may not support iframes for security reasons.
- Google is your friend: search for “(your blogging platform)> embed iframe”, or if you get stuck give @AGBear a shout on Twitter.