"Where is all the good writing about games?"
This week brings a selection of powerful and timely articles about inclusivity within games as well their overlapping communities of play, design, and criticality. With a shift by some major journalistic outlets away from scored reviews, as well as continued troubling reports…
This week I have enjoyed a wealth of fine criticism concerning the relationship between games and the recent past as authors explore “retro” trends in titles new and old. Great writing is also being done on the nature and role of criticism itself,…
It’s been a good week for topics that definitely deserve more attention – I was excited to read pieces that pick up on how the movement of the player-character’s body intrinsically affects the narrative meaning of a game, and also gratified to…
This week, games and their critics ponders at length about inclusivity, technology, change, and play. In particular, games and their communities are examined on inclusion and the considerations of silence. Games are also thought of as lenses for varying perspectives. And finally,…
Investigative reporting on games culture has had a strong week, as well as histories of game design, development, and criticism. Our weekly roundup of critical writing on games, This Week in Videogame Blogging keeps you up to date with the most fascinating…
It’s been a week of mystery and wonder, as multiple critics show us the limits of what we can really know about games -some arguing that this unknowability is in fact how games work. Along the way, we learn about some new…
Trauma, abuse, hell, and postmodernism are just some of the stops on this week’s journey through critical writing on games. Yet somehow, it’s a fun ride, with high-quality prose, a wide range of voices, and clear takeaways for anyone creating things in…
Although it’s typical for AAA games to attract the majority of the in-depth writing, in the context of increasing tension around labor exploitation, more critics are considering the power dynamics of big publisher corporations and populist gamer culture. This week in videogame…
The weird thing about living such a digitally connected life is that all the work needed to make such a world possible is often made invisible and taken for granted. With games, the more human effort leaks into the player’s experience, the…
Videogames and VR are often described as “empathy machines” – and though that term was first used for cinema, the idea today is often that newer mediums are more immersive, and therefore more empathetic, than those that came before. But what does…