This Week in Videogame Blogging

June 23rd

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Welcome back, readers. First of all, if you haven’t already checked out Gilles Roy’s stellar Critical Compilation on Assassin’s Creed III, I can’t recommend it enough! After so many sequels, III remains a sort of critical flashpoint for the series, so there’s…

June 16th

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Welcome back, readers, and happy Father’s Day to y’all who celebrate it. E3 has come and gone, and readers and especially writers are no doubt in recovery mode after the annual avalanche of coverage on all The New Games. While many of…

June 9th

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Welcome back, readers! E3 is next week? I guess? We’ve got a very timely piece this week on the damaging effects of hype, which I enjoyed a great deal and which you can find below. On the academic circuit, it’s also conference…

June 2nd

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Welcome back, readers, and happy Pride Month! Many of this week’s selections can be related back to the notion of inclusivity in some way. The decisions you make as a designer to include (or not include) accessibility and/or difficulty options affects who…

May 26th

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Welcome back, readers. So, gaming disorder, huh? That’s a thing this week. I’m interested to see what kinds of critical responses emerge on this topic over the coming weeks, and how that influences (or doesn’t influence) the turn by big publishers towards…

May 19th

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Welcome back, readers. While there has been no shortage of bad press about crunch in games development over the last several months (and rightly so), it seems that there are still large studios who haven’t fully committed to acknowledging that there’s a…

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May 12th

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Welcome, readers (and Happy Mother’s Day to those who observe it today!). In reflecting on the major labour stories in games news this week, I think it’s important to keep in mind that while everyone under abusive management suffers, women, queer, and…

May 5th

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Hello readers! This week’s labour abuse spotlight is on NetherRealm, and the story runs pretty much the whole way through the studio’s history. I hate that my touching on this is practically a weekly feature in its own right at this point,…

April 28th

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Welcome back, readers. So, when I expressed the hope last week that there would be provocative critical takes on the new Mortal Kombat game released this week, I didn’t mean this. But why should I expect the Internet to have anything other…

April 21st

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Welcome, readers. There’s a lot of looking back in critical games writing this week, which makes sense to me, since for many it’s a holiday weekend and we are in kind of a lull period between GDC and E3. Big releases have…