New website! Part 1: search

I’m excited to be hearing so much positive feedback about the new site design. I’ve been working hard to make this into a meaningful improvement to the experience of people coming here for the first time or checking in on a regular…

October 2nd

Welcome to our swanky new website! It’s been an intense week of web development, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite this proud of a website I’ve worked on. I hope you like what you see, and do let me know…

September 25th

I’m blown away by the volume of high-quality writing this week. All the great stuff seems to be coming out at once! It’s overwhelming. To make it all a little easier to digest, I’ve broken this week’s roundup into four parts. Take…

September 11th

Welcome to this week’s late summer feast of writing on games, semiotics, and dogs.  Morality First we address the moral questions explored in interactive fiction, as two critics play the politics of enlightenment. Pigmote Isle | Problem Machine The Problem Machine blog…

September 4th

After a week of taco trucks, it’s time to settle down and digest the meaty issues in games criticism. A quick note before we continue: Critical Distance is just $40 away from the Patreon goal that allows us to stay afloat and…

August 28th

This week’s blogging has me thinking about how developers manage the expectations of others, the roots of protagonists’ personal ethics, and how players’ morality is shaped by the expectations of people around us. Blame, shame and guilt chase each other around the whole of this roundup, as writers…

August 21st

Whew! There was a LOT of great writing on No Man’s Sky to get through this weekend. Pretty soon the number of pieces of writing on that game will rival the number of planets it contains. Nobody can explore them all, so I’m here…

August 14th

This week is all about those big, open spaces: the endless expanse of a procedurally-generated universe, the mysterious depths of the ocean, and the reimagined streets of a Pokemon-enriched city. Battlefields We start with escapism and its opposite. How do we cope…

August 7th

Hope you’re keeping well and having an exciting Summer! I got to meet some of our regular readers this week at games academia’s big annual get-together. It was a great reminder of how insightful our supporters are, and how important it is to bridge…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

July 31st

This week in our roundup of games writing from around the web, we go on a little meditative journey about our place in the world and how we act within it. The digital is not flat We start by asking who we…