"Where is all the good writing about games?"
What would happen if you analysed games beginning with the question, ‘what is the first choice that the player makes?’ In First Foot Forward February, we’re collecting critical perspectives on games that focus on the earliest moment of player agency. In some…
Hello readers! First, and I don’t say this often enough, I’d like to thank everybody here–readers, supporters, folks who point us in the direction of articles, who hang out on our Discord–everyone, for sticking with us over the last 13 years and…
Event Details Date: March 26, 2022 1pm – 2pm Eastern time Location: Discord Join Critical Distance and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination for the launch of our new, free ebook, Sickness, Systems, Solidarity, which explores the tangled relationships between pandemics and…
None can resist the unrelenting march of time. Our political world may feel like a torturous kind of stasis but the natural world continues to go through its motions, hurtling through space at 792,000 km per hour, in a valiant but futile…
An (incomplete) list of functions of lists, as a prelude to List Jam: I feel like “lists” are seen as a shallow or resented element of games criticism online, like the inevitable churn of year end lists that reinforce the need to…
Following our bitsy essay jam, we’re announcing another jam event, this time for micro-essays, brought to you in partnership with the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University! The global cataclysm of COVID-19, and the quarantines and social distancing…
The essay is a flexible format that allows its author to communicate, work through, and explore thoughts without traditional formal barriers. The content of essays can be personal, literary, historical, philosophical, aesthetic, and is often a combination of many topics, perspectives, and…
Pitches are now closed! Thanks everyone who submitted! Listen, 2020 might go down as a deeply terrible year for many reasons, but we’re still here, and if you’re reading this, we assume so are you. Critical Distance has always been about showcasing…
We interrupt our regularly scheduled roundups and compilations to announce our Blogger of the Year for 2019–the author who we feel wrote the best stuff, or had the biggest impact, or simply made the most important contributions to critical games writing over…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! When thoughts turn to nostalgia and we all gather round the fire to remember the game criticism of a more innocent time. As usual, Critical Distance is compiling its annual This Year in Videogame…