"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.
Critics enumerate videogames’ hyper-quantified powers, whisper their unspeakable horrors, and dig through the catacombs of their less-known histories. This roundup brings you the week’s most insightful and original writing on games from around the web. Overcoming demons First, a quick look at…
Games history went off the beaten track this week, with pieces of writing and video on alternative and even unsanctioned aspects of the medium’s heritage. Meanwhile, genre-bending analyses and challenging calls for better artistic dialogue abound, as writers unpick the critical issues…
This week brings us a bunch of pieces of great critical writing on games, that put the medium into conversation with philosophy, history, and spirituality. First, this roundup starts with some reflections on old technologies seen in a new light. A new…
This week’s games criticism offers insights with implications that go far beyond game design, touching on how we imagine ourselves, our models of morality, and how we organize our arguments and ideologies. Plus, critics offer some much-needed clarity on some of the…
This week’s critical writing on games sheds light on the different cultural contexts that influence how games are received – from the problems that arise when showing art games in commercial environments, to how we can process our painful history through interactive…
What can the most recent games learn from their own predecessors? And what kind of futures do games point us toward? Questions of past, present, and future pervade this week’s roundup of the most insightful games blogging. Pattern-making Three pieces this week…
Resistance, systemic cruelty, and the role of individuals are major themes of writing this week. In addition, we’ve got great stuff on inclusivity and the history of game design, and some engaging ideas about how games meet the art world. First, however,…
The big discussion of the week is loot boxes – also known as gacha mechanics – or, in-game microtransactions with randomised contents. A long-controversial aspect of free-to-play games, these items have featured prominently in recent AAA game releases, provoking a wave of…
A guilty pleasure of mine is critical writing that takes things to that meta level. Critical writing about criticism. This week, writers came up with taxonomies, heuristics, and semiotic analyses. I’ve had the pleasure of reading many pieces that reveal something about…
“Progress” has become a problematic idea of late: the notion that the passage of time will push society generally in the direction of civil rights has become a truism, but the idea has been brought into question ever more over the past…