May 10th
byWelcome! Welcome! Pull up a pew – anywhere will do. Let us now pray and give thanks to The Gods of Blogging About Videogames for this bountiful harvest of tasty reading we are about to receive. Today, we give thanks for the…
Critical Distance: The First Month and the Future
byDear Critical Distance Readers, Contributors and Interested Parties, What is Critical Distance? What is its purpose and what is its aim? What gap in the field, what niche of interest, does it serve to fill? These are questions I have been asking…
Achievement Unlocked: Sex!
byAlex Raymond, of the While !Finished blog at the Iris Gaming Network, explains how games have established a rather simplistic view of relationships in her post “Women Aren’t Vending Machines: How Video Games Perpetuate the Commodity Model of Sex“: What the vast…
Episode 3 – Showing, Telling, Performing Narrative
byIt has arrived! Episode 3 of the CDC Podcast. This week we discuss the approaches to videogame narrative, specifically the differences between showing and telling narrative in games. We have a very special international cast this week. So sit back and enjoy…
Soren Johnson Discusses Sid’s Lessons
bySoren Johnson discusses a number of lessons he learned from Sid Meier during his time at Firaxis. All four observations are good, but the third and fourth are especially resonant for me. Calls for thematic simplicity and “show, don’t tell” have grown…
May 3rd
byWelcome to another exciting instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging. Before we dive in, I should probably explain how I go about compiling this list of the best stuff from around the blogosphere from the week. It goes something like this:…
Chris Avellone on RPG Conventions
byLast week saw the ‘Framework’ conference in Melbourne, and Kotaku Editor David Wildgoose attended a lecture given by Chris Avellone – he of Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 fame. In a nice recap, Wildgoose talks about…
No Culture? Gameplay Aesthetes
bySure, it’s about a board game, and a forgettable one at that, but Greg Costikyan makes a point that it’s important to know about the history behind even bad or un-interesting games: For what godforsaken reason are we featuring Twiggy Game today?…
Anna Anthropy on Games
byThis will be the second time I’ve linked to something involving Anna Anthropy (a.k.a Aunti Pixelante), but I think she’s got a particularly different take on games and play than what we usually hear. I feel this (too short) interview highlights some…
JG Ballard, Boredom, And The Violent Promise Of Videogames – Offworld
byJim Rossignol, Editor of RPS and writer-extraordinare, wrote a fitting farewell tribute to the late JG Ballard on Offworld today. In it, Rossignol eloquently examines Ballard’s effect not only on his own creativity, but on that of contemporary culture and the consumerist…