January 5th
byWelcome back, readers, and welcome to a new year and a new decade. Things feel a little bleak right now, I know, but let’s do what we can to make the best of things, shall we? (Update Jan 6 2020: I have…
temporality
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.
December 15th
byWelcome back, readers. While things were a bit forward-looking last week, this time retrospectives are the name of the game, with many authors looking back on games, practices, and critiques of the past. Speaking of retrospectives, don’t forget that we are receiving…
December 1st
byWelcome 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…
November 24th
byWelcome 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…
November 10th
byWelcome 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….
October 27th
byWelcome 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…
September 15th
byWelcome 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…
September 8th
byWelcome 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…
September 1st
byThere’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…
July 21st
byWelcome 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…