"Where is all the good writing about games?"
Between vintage games collections, retro aesthetics, and the increasing interest in games from the museum sector, the position of games in their own time is a topic close to many people’s hearts. Games themselves are a medium that plays with time, inheriting questions of pacing and anticipation from cinema.
Welcome back, readers. This week there’s an emphasis on communities, and especially indie development communities and their relationship to larger-scale studio structures. I didn’t expect to be curating critical discourse on Half-Life: Alyx months before its release, but Trevor Hultner and Emily…
Welcome back, readers. Pokémon: how many ‘mons y’all got so far? I’m sitting around 30 because I’m a slow player with a lot of professional and not-so-professional commitments. A friend of mine is pushing 60, and neither of us has hit the…
Welcome back, readers. There’s a lot going on this week! I should have come to expect that by now, given how the big releases tend to pick up around this time of year, but it’s hard to keep track of it all….
Welcome back, readers. There’s lots of interesting writing on games this week, particularly from non-gaming-focused outlets. There’s also, it seems, a whole lot of big-name titles with really interesting writing coming out right now. Disco Elysium and The Outer Worlds come immediately…
Welcome back, readers. This week’s most prominent labour story in games (aside from what is starting to feel like quarterly announcements of bad news from GameStop) is the workplace culture inside indie publisher Nicalis. While most of the stories this year about…
Welcome back, readers. It’s a great week for critical games writing. Control seems to be the big game right now, and I swear I’ll play it as soon as I’m done with World of Warcraft Classic, which I’m playing for the first…
There’s no shortage of essential, boundary-pushing critical games writing these days, and that’s no less true this week. I’ve said before that it’s a pleasure and a privilege to curate this work, and I mean that. (Content Notifications: physical/emotional/sexual abuse) I had…
Welcome back, readers. So a delightful trove of documents and materials have surfaced this week detailing the early development history of the The Sims and how queerness was an integral–and subversive–inclusion from the beginning. And of course, it largely comes down to…
Welcome back, readers. Friends, I am in my element this week. People are writing about old JRPGs, queerness, accessibility, inclusivity, and bad toys from the 90s. Oh, and writers are taking the Mordhau devs to task for some wildly bad messaging that’s…
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…