"Where is all the good writing about games?"
Although we are separated by great distances it is nice to be back in your lives, internet friends, no matter how or when you come across this edition of Blogs of the Round Table. ‘Time’ is something we implicitly care a lot about…
The familiarity of portrayals of combat, pain, and trauma were explored by many critics this week, as people look at how tropes get started, how they are perpetuated, and how they can be subverted. E3 Critical reflection on E3 has so far…
Direct Download Freshly back from E3, YouTuber Hamish Black, the man behind the Writing on Games channel, sat down with me for this month’s interview. Nearly two years ago exactly, Hamish Black took the plunge and began making critical YouTube videos. He…
People often say that games give us a chance to try out being somebody else. But I think a great strength of this week’s writing was the pieces challenging us to be more aware of who we already are. Appropriation This week…
What is a role playing game? You might have a fixed idea of what the genre is and how it works, but this week some writers are challenging those assumptions and asking you to see them differently. That plus discussions of gender…
Hello and happy spring to all you lovely readers of Critical Distance. For those keeping score at home, I’ve been a touch discombobulated in the last few months, or as I like to describe myself: “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” In any case, I am thankful…
There’s a little event called E3 going on this week, and with it comes plenty of new games and rapid-fire discourse. Yet we stand firm in our mission to curate the internet’s most intriguing critical writing and challenging media. This week you’ll…
I feel like the world asked a lot of us this past month. Responsibilities come in all sorts, and sometimes they can catch us when we’re least prepared for them. All the same, we soldier on as best we can. This past…
This week we take a look at how we shape our personal worlds, and how games are shaped by us. Not just from a design standpoint, but by the way we explore our worlds and how that world informs the games we…
How can game creators design for specific flavours of fear? This question is a big theme of writing this week, in what has turned out to be a particularly good selection of critical writing on games. I’m excited to hit “publish” on this…