What the heck– you’ve waited enough. Let’s get right to it with this week’s best and brightest of the Ludodecahedron. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Tumblr-er Flutiebear starts us off with this excellent two part series applying Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey to Disney’s Tangled and Bioware’s Dragon Age 2. These analyses come highly recommended.

From there, we pay a visit to GayGamer where newest writer EccentricTomboy writes on seeing sexism in competitive gaming from two sides:

See, back before transition I would have been that guy: amused by the girl trying to play a man’s game and trying to give her a good experience. It’s the same reflex that prompts my friends to introduce me as a female gamer who is “actually really good at games,” as if this is something that just isn’t possible in our normal gaming life.

Meanwhile, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers sits down with Rachel Weil, founder of FEMICOM, “a collection of twentieth century games for girls”:

[I]nstead of passing the site by, my eyes lingered over that tagline: The feminine computer museum. “All right, FEMICOM,” I thought, clicking through the links. “Just how are you defining ‘feminine’? Feminine according to who?”

As it turns out, this is exactly the question that FEMICOM wants you to be asking. Failing to explore this site would have been a big mistake on my part. Not only did it lead to one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve had about gender roles in games, but it made me put my own gaming preferences under the microscope.

On the subject of curation, Venturebeat’s Jeff DiOrio has a fantastic interview up with Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.

Speaking of history, this week Split-Screen’s Alan Williamson poked fun at developers’ creating a false impression of it through those infamous “Game of the Year” repackagings. As Williamson observes, “Special editions aren’t about specialty. They are mere upselling.”

Quality was also on the mind of Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs this week, as he reminds readers that all these successfully funded Kickstarter games are still hypothetical:

What if the new Wasteland game is released and it’s just kind of crappy?

I feel like there is a lot of pressure on these first rounds of high-profile Kickstarted games to actually do well in release and in the public eye. It’s great that there’s been so much enthusiasm for giving money directly to creators of content, but now the onus is on them to deliver on some of these very big promises they’ve made. To be honest, I think the future of Kickstarter itself actually lies with them.

GUS MASTRAPA, whose name I occasionally write in all-caps just for emphasis, had two articles of note this week. First is his repost of his Kill Screen piece on games and heavy metal. Next, the latest in his Pretension +1 column for Unwinnable is a (rather charming and empathetic, in Mastrapa’s usual fashion) reflection on how games will be the death of him:

Part of my problem is that I let myself get derailed. I’ll make some good habits and frequent the gym for a month or two. And then something like E3 will come up and throw me off. I’ll come back exhausted and start the spiral again. For a while I tried to use videogames as a carrot, but my World of Warcraft workout was short-lived. When I made exercise a requirement for playing the game, I just wound up playing less. That was the path of least resistance. For a while I used Foursquare to kind of gamify gym attendance, but that didn’t work either. Some asshole named Pierre kept snaking me for the mayor prize. I was sure he was cheating somehow.

Josh Bycer has a list of five ways to bring the survival horror genre back from the dead. And Nightmare Mode’s Dylan Holmes appears to find games fatal in another way– namely, the unlock strategies of certain multiplayer games, and how these break the game.

Further on the subject of first-person shooters, Dan Nosowitz expresses his concerns for Sniper Elite V2’s hyperrealistic “KillCam”. Thirdly, and a chief contender for article of the week, is Paolo Pedercini’s editorial for Kotaku on how franchises such as Call of Duty: Black Ops valorize a particularly frightening kind of warfare:

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the “proper” military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

Also at Kotaku this week, Mark Serrels takes aim at Ubisoft’s advertising practices and asks “Why are we so willing to become conduits for marketing?” Taking the longer view, Simon Parkin posts his interview with Ubisoft Toronto’s Jade Raymond and the nuances entering into Raymond’s particular high profile in the industry.

From AAA to smaller development, Dennis of Superlevel attempts to put a finer point on the definition of “indie game.” Meanwhile, Unwinnable’s Tim Mucci offers tabletop gamemasters (but really, all game developers) some tips for writing better NPCs.

Another recurring theme this week was the role of difficulty in design practices. First up, and perhaps most controversially among the dev readership, Taekwan Kim takes the position that costing users time through user-unfriendly design is about equivalent with paid unlocking schemes:

Let’s be blunt. Time costs are real. So isn’t it just as manipulative to exploit the fact that the more time you spend, the more expensive and valuable the object necessarily becomes? Is a game that refrains from selling “I win” consumables any less dubious if it forces players to spend inflationary amounts of time? And what else can you call no respec, permadeath, etc. but devices that inflate time costs? More troublesomely, is that actually even a bad thing?

On the player side of the equation, Chris Waldron writes favorably of player-developed, voluntary hardcore challenges in their ability to change the experience of play:

Take, for example, the ‘Nuzlocke Challenge’ of the Pokemon RPGs. In the standard game, Pokemon faint once their hit points are depleted; in a Nuzlocke run, they die, and therefore must be instantly released, never to be seen again; if your whole team falls then I’m afraid it’s game over. [...] the Poke-universe takes on a whole new air of morbidity. It stands to reason that if your Pokemon die upon fainting then, surely, so do your opponent’s. Therefore, hundreds of Pokemon must die in order for yours to prosper, adding a layer of moral ambiguity to an otherwise light-hearted game.

Marcus Pettersson is likewise in favor of more punishing gameplay experiences, though here he argues for harder games on the design level– or in his words, developers need to “design games like a bastard“.

As a little nightcap for you all, several of our readers wrote in this week with some fantastic new/obscure blogs for your perusal: Charlie Wheeler’s The Rules on the Field, focusing on sports and game design, and Pathologistics, a blog dedicated to mapping Russian cult game Pathologic. Both are recommended, although perhaps not the latter if you’re just about to go to bed.

Join us next week for more of the best game critique and commentary across the web! And as always, we welcome your tweets and emails!

Muchas gracias are due to Ben for filling in on my curatorial role last week. He’s not getting this job back, though! Come hell or term papers, it’s time once again for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

To kick us off, Eurogamer’s Rich Stanton has a great retrospective up on the rise and fall of Free Radical Design beginning with its founders’ departure from Rare. Meanwhile, Keith Stuart at Hookshot pays tribute to the ZX Spectrum, now 30 years old, and the indies who developed on it.

But special kudos this week go to Robert Rath’s excellent profile on PlaGMaDA, the Play Generated Map and Document Archive, for The Escapist:

[T]o Hutchings, the Archive isn’t merely a research resource, but also a gallery of aesthetic objects. Hutchings sees the documents in the context of Outsider Art and Folk Art, an interpretation that becomes more intriguing the longer you dig into the Archive. The maps are the most visually striking objects – intricately detailed layouts of castles stormed and dungeons crawled, filled with handwritten notes and illustrations of doorways and items. One map, obviously held by a campaign villain, contains a reminder to “feed prisoners to Turgarum” along with the exuberant notation, “More Gold and Slaves!”

Anyone interested in classical tabletop and the artifacts thereof will definitely find Rath’s article, and PlaGMaDA , very engrossing.

From curation to critique, Kiala Kazebee made a splash on Gameranx this week with this piece satirizing the condescending tone of “girlfriend” articles. You know the ones I mean.

On the subject of formula, Lana Polansky traces the predigital origins of the feminine “helping hand” archetype of game sidekicks. And Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton expounds upon horror film satire Cabin in the Woods to reveal the formulaic imperatives of other genres– like action games.

Over at Play the Past, Roger Travis has embarked on a multipart series on the Mass Effect franchise. In commenting on the series’s interaction with ideas of player agency, Travis (perhaps coincidentally?) echoes the grand dame Janet Murray herself:

[T]he way the game produces its effect is little different than JM Barrie’s famous ludic moment in Peter Pan: choice matters because the player convinces him or herself that it matters; the story can’t proceed unless choice matters, because the story proceeds when the player makes choices.

Following that path, we venture over to Scott Juster’s latest Moving Pixels contribution, “A Segmented Sky“:

I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past recently and have found that I can still remember how to walk from the foot of the mountains to the middle of the desert by memory. Because of this, the game still retains its sense of place when I take a shortcut by instantly warping around the map. I may be skipping a lot of obstacles, but I know that they exist, and I know how they connect the world.

This feeling of connectivity is part of what makes the game (as well as many Zelda games) special; the world feels like an ecosystem, one in which fast travel and load screens are concessions to convenience and technical limitations, as opposed to a segmented approach to design. It’s also a feeling that was impossible for me to have in the latest Zelda title, Skyward Sword, a game whose very structure feels like a series of disjointed plane trips over a disconnected world.

Why is that? You’ll just have to read the full article and see.

The next article was clearly written with Ben Abraham’s round-up in mind, but though I don’t enjoy weird as much as Ben does, I felt obligated to include it: Darius Kazemi’s metaphysical dialogue on ontology, Latour, and Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-Filled Sky. See? I told you it was a Ben thing.

(The next section bears a trigger warning for ableist language.)

One article which sparked a great number of response posts this week was Taylor Clark’s clarification of his Jonathan Blow profile for The Atlantic: “Most Popular Video Games are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing for Them Now?” Of the response pieces, Matthew Burns’s “The Animal as System,” seems the most cogent reply, arguing for a holistic view:

A game is a whole system; the pieces that we like to dissect are its organs. You can take issue with and maybe even improve the components, but what you really want is a brand new animal, a new system where all the parts work together. By saying that Vanquish is a great game but could benefit from better story and characters, Clark implicitly proposes a mythical beast— the kind with the head of one animal and the body of another.

(End trigger warning section.)

Nightmare Mode’s Alois Wittwer remarks on tall poppy syndrome and our fondness for “elevating” games to films. And Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank provides us with the most delightful non-review-review of indie dev Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters:

Anthropy’s real mission is only this: a more perfect world, one in which everyone can build a videogame. Maybe these games will be unedited and jejune and a little bit broken, as zines themselves often are, but that’s supposed to be the allure. The games will be authentic, these experiential snapshots, the works of diarists instead of artists and computer programmers.

Finally for this week’s roundup: Game Design as Cultural Practice, a blog curated by GA Tech professor Celia Pearce, has been featuring some fantastic student essays in recent weeks (perhaps due to the end of the semester coming up, hmm?). One of which, on the application of New Games philosophy to Alternate Reality Games, comes especially recommended.

May the Sith be with you! Oh, you’re probably dreadfully sick of those jokes by now, aren’t you? Well, nevermind, then. Just be sure to check in with us again next Sunday for more of the best of game blogging from around the web! And don’t forget to send in your recommendations by twitter and email as well– and yes we do welcome a bit of self-promotion! Don’t be shy!

Oh dear look who left the keys to TWIVGB on the kitchen table for me to find. Yes, in her distracted exam-cramming state, Kris left me in charge of TWIVGB once again. I’m sorry.

Look, here’s a little secret I’m going to share with you: sometimes writing about videogames is… how do I put this…. not weird enough. I’m going to try and pick out some of the weirder stuff this week.

For instance: At the architectural/landscape/urbanism blog M.ammoth, Rob Holmes regales us with a short anecdote about a student designing a game as part of an investigation into the ramifications of the Mississippi river diverting it’s course:

One of the student projects proposed a kind of abstracted board game which attempted to codify the interactions between the insurance industry, various economic activities in the Atachafalaya Basin (such as gambling), floods, disaster management systems, public space, and citizens of the flood-prone Basin. This project intrigued me greatly — but it did so less because of its resonance with the recent vogue for “gamification” (where I am inclined to agree, for the most part, with Ian Bogost), and more because it helped me articulate a set of problems related to aggregation, complexity, perversity, and misalignment in the design of landscapes.

It’s only a brief little mention amongst a sea of tranquil information-overload, but it’s interesting. It’s weird.

Sufficiently weird enough for me is also Darshana Jayemanne’s ‘Do It Differently’ essay for Killscreen which argues we should stop playing up the ‘uniqueness’ of videogames interactivity. It’s a powerful and unpopular argument, but I think he’s right.

Look around you. Architecture is an art form—you’d be brave indeed to claim the Sistine Chapel or the Patio de los Leones are not art, and only slightly less brave to call them “linear.” Robert Venturi and Fredric Jameson didn’t have to wait for ludology to be invented so they could wrap their heads around the nonlinear spaces of Las Vegas and the Bonaventure Hotel, respectively. Similar observations could be made for sculpture or improvisational music. In these art forms the distinction between linear and nonlinear is just a nonsense. It does not even arise as a problem in the first place.

Go read his whole argument and then tell me you don’t get a sense that Things Could Be Wholly Other about videogame writing and criticism. Weird indeed.

Not entirely sure if this really hits the high point on my ‘weird’ metric, but it’s an interesting piece and it goes well with Jayemanne’s piece above – at Medium Difficulty Kyle Stegerwald discusses whether writers and critics can actually be bad at games and still be good critics. I don’t think he’s wholly right, but neither is he wholly wrong, primarily because games writing could be so, so many things and Stegerwald seems to have just one particular thing in mind. Still – definitely worth reading and thinking about. For Stegerwald:

…skill in games resembles critical understanding in literature, and nobody sneers at someone who advances a well-reasoned opinion of a piece of literature by calling them a “minmaxer.”

Also at Medium Difficulty this week is neat little discussion by Adil Sherwani on ‘The State of Music Games’ (by which it is meant the Rock Band/Guitar Hero style music game). It’s sort of history, really, and History, as anyone who knows anything about it will tell you, is Really Weird.

Oh yes! And this is a sufficiently strange offering from the always-intriguing David Carlton who paid a visit to France’s Musée d’Orsay and took inspiration from the range of nudes and other paintings, sculptures, etc in the museums collection:

A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals and proposed that narrative video games should present themselves as a sequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, with just enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to set piece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Musée d’Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of those set pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. There should be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each set piece with the rest unfolding from it.

Brilliant stuff. Go read it, if only for all the brilliant images of paintings the Museum holds.

Also brilliant this week was Cara Ellison’s discussion of Christine Love’s ‘Don’t Take It Personally, Babe’ and ‘Being Single in Public’ for the Unwinnable blog:

Playing Don’t Take It Personally, Babe when you’re single, and have been for a while, is an alienating experience. It’s a wonderful shorthand of the messages that are going on around us every day. Couple culture is everywhere – it’s in every televisual soap or drama, it’s in every advertising campaign.

As a young man who has spent the vast, vast majority of his life within the kingdom of singledom I know exactly what Ellison is talking about, and it can be a very, very weird place.

Also from Unwinnable this week is Kate Williams piece on Dear Esther, describing it as “a sudden heartbeat in a flatlining relationship”.

G. Christopher Williams writing for PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog this week thinks Ms Pacman is the Platonic form of games. That’s kind of a strange argument, but that’s kind of the point. More strange please!

Mattie Brice writing for Paste Magazine this week asks ‘Who’s the bad guy?‘ and discusses being a demographic actively excluded from videogame marketing and taste-appeal (which would be a very weird feeling).

Jeffrey Wilson at 2D-X has a cool little anecdote about ‘The Night Castlevania and Wu Tang Clan owned NYC’ and the hunt for a Castlevania sample heard (imagined? Auditory hallucination?!) in a 90s hip-hop track.

And here’s another weird little thing from BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh who has a little think about some game-applications for MIT’s distributed robotics’ ‘Smart Sand’:

…perhaps in some future game brought to you by BLDGBLOG and Big Robot—you have to battle your way forward through infinite sandstone buildings that rise up, one after the other, like endless violent waves rolling as far as the eye can see, a desert of shapes lurching and unbuilding themselves toward you, forever. You jump through doors, up stairways, over walls, never advancing forward more than a few feet at a time, blinded by clouds of sand crashing on all sides, always another building ready to rise up out of the moving dunes and block you.

At Sneaky Bastards (possibly the best named videogame blog on the internet) James Patton has words about the Maltese Falcon and Games and Society and stuff. The piece describes itself (blogs these days! They do all your work for you!) as “Examining the stealth genre’s depictions of society and culture, as seen through the stark, shadowy lens of The Maltese Falcon.”

Vying for the ‘best videogame blog name’ competition is Full Glass, Empty Clip (I’m surprised that I’ve not stumbled upon this site before), where blogger ‘Stavros the Wonder Chicken’ aka Christopher Kovacs talks about ‘Living in First Person’:

Part of growing up isolated and insulated, for me at least, was burning curiosity about Other Places. Ever since I could remember, every new thing I learned about the world out there filled me with ever greater desire to see it for myself.

And here’s a funny new tumblblog ‘Postplay’:

POSTPLAY is a project founded on the fundamental principle that a video game is only as relevant as the contemplations or debates it provokes may be equally worthy of note; that the most significant games are, by definition, those which are capable of stimulating an edifying discussion and different degrees of contemplation. This, however, does not insinuate that a widely discussed title is, by definition, pertinent; quite the contrary, for this same criterion presupposes that the character and corollaries of the dialogue it incites provide an authentic intimation of its veritable merit.

Oh and I very nearly forgot – Michael Abbott at the Brainy Gamer blog, inspired by Taylor Clarke’s essay/profile of Jon Blow in The Atlantic, has started a crowd sourced catalogue of “Smart Games” to counteract the notion that games are only Hollywood dumb. Go check it out, it’s a weird lest (yes!) and it can get weirder if you choose to add stuff to it. Go forth and submit strange and eclectic games!

Hmm, so that’s the week in weird videogame writing, but it could always be weirder, more eclectic, more ambitious. Take that under consideration.

Here, one final parting curio: a mind-blowingly beautiful Vietnamese Café. Think about that and level design. Lets see that in a game.

I hope you enjoyed some of the weirdness. As always, we rely on your submissions to make it through the week. Send them via twitter or email, if you please!

Happy Sunday! It’s all highs and lows in This Week in Videogame Blogging, as we once again look to the best of the best in gaming critique and commentary from across the web. Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, a realist or absurdist, it’s all here! Let’s get started.

First, a bit of history. BulletMagnet over on Racketboy writes up an illustrative history of shoot-em-ups. Meanwhile, Stephen E. Dinehart sits down with game writing veteran Susan O’Connor as part of his Game Writers in the Trenches series.

Next up, the always-engaging Matthew Weise at Outside Your Heaven traces the decline in anti-Americanism in the Metal Gear franchise, a trend he sees beginning with the departure of one of its key writers and an uptick in the series’s fascination with its own mythology: “Questions like ‘who are The Patriots?’ and ‘was Big Boss good or evil?’ are really only interesting if they aren’t answered.”

Drawing upon more contemporary history, Julian Benson traces some connections between the serious game Sweatshop, the financial MMO EVE Online, and the 2008 financial crisis. Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker, on the other hand, rips straight from the headlines– and spits on them, critiquing the shoddy journalism that has gone into connecting Norwegian bomber Anders Breivik with videogames.

Responding to the now-infamous Atlantic profile on Braid developer Jonathan Blow, Cameron Kunzelman takes aim at the myth of the game (or film) auteur:

Let me be clear: the actual political economy of film did not change [following the classic Hollywood studio system]. Films were still vetted by execs, funded by studios, and ran by unions. What really occurred during the shift toward the auteur was that the public had a name and face to attach to a movie. Directors were names attached to bodies. That was just an illusion, though. No matter how much I liked Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the lesson that I got from the book was that power will never rest in the hands of a creator who will not play the studio game–every famous director is a puppet. That’s the reason Coppola decided to open up a vineyard.

Another iconoclast, Richard Dillio, has some strong words for the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco, an article which really comes into its own in the final third:

If you were a big cheese over at EA, you be laughing at the sheer genius of the current situation: your studio made a game with a crappy ending, but still sold millions of units. The ending was so crappy, and people were so pissed, that they demanded a new ending, which you can charge them for. No matter what, you’re making shitloads of cash. You’d be the fucking Mr. Burns of video games. In what other industry do people willingly pay a creative team more money to redo something they should’ve gotten right in the first place? I can’t think of a single one.

Speaking of downer endings you wouldn’t think to patch, Scott Juster has been reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and he muses on the book’s connections to other, non-Mass Effect down notes. Attending instead to the journalistic question of gaming toward endings, Kill Screen staff writer Michael Thomsen and founder Jamin Warren debate the need to reach an ending at all.

Patricia Hernandez’s latest piece for Kotaku is an interesting indictment of games as making us aspire to a middle-class, homogenous lifestyle: “Skyrim promised me the oft-peddled and largely untrue myth of being able to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and while it delivered on that promise, what I found myself doing was often depressingly meaningless and rote.”

Rob Zacny directs a similar challenge, not to developers, but players of strategy games, suggesting that quicksaving is harming the genre by making these tidy wins easy.

Not all articles about the intersection of players and design are so somber this week, however. On Nightmare Mode, Alois Wittwer takes us on a cute jaunt through the confusing tiers of agency in Hot Shots Golf. And darting back into late March for a second, we have Tom Chick hating Journey in his typically witty way.

On the subject of Journey, Rachel Helps draws upon her own religious upbringing to unearth connections with the game as religious ritual. And while we’re on the subject of religious themes in games, John Brindle has a new post up historicizing L’Abbaye des Morts, proving once again how dangerously hard it is to put a Brindle article down.

On the academic front, Andrew K Przybylski and his team have published their interesting study on using games to act out “the ideal self” in the Journal for Psychological Science.

Jason Tocci has a new feature up on Gamasutra regarding the five forms of game appeal. Lastly, Luke Maciak looks forward to Notch’s next gaming venture as a call back to an inspirational golden age for hackers and programmers.

Join us next week as we deliver some more hot-and-cold top picks from the ludodecahedron! Want to keep Critical Distance from getting lukewarm? Send in your links via Twitter or email today!

Achoo! It’s too cold for my liking over here. Let’s warm up by the fire with a nice fresh supply of game criticism, theory and commentary. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

The man I usurped to get this gig, Ben Abraham, is back again this week with a compelling video essay in which he questions our fondness for the term immersion. This follows on a theme in recent weeks in respect to Jenova Chen’s master thesis, and is also echoed in Tony Ventrice’s feature on Gamasutra on flow in mobile media.

Also hailing from Gamasutra, Ara Shirinian investigates how we might use psychology to design intuitive graphical user interfaces. And Jorge Albor takes the subject to the dark side in ruminating on the use of psychology to develop alienating structures and creatures:

[T]he same visceral reaction that we have to Giger’s work or the synthetic/organic husks of Mass Effect 3 mirrors a reaction that future generations are intended to have when they meet the WIPP’s warning markers. There is horror found in artificial yet unreadable architecture.

Responding to John Walker’s essay on the perceived runniness, shall we say, of games’ subject matter, Joseph Hilgard contends that we’re looking in the wrong places for gaming subject matter we can sink our teeth into:

If we want our games to provide us with real nourishment, I would argue that the last thing we need is last year’s shooter wrapped in some awkward story about love and loss, or yet another indie platformer about the inevitability of mortality. We don’t need superficially serious themes. We need new and interesting games which provide novel and challenging forms of play.

Ed Smith also voices misgivings in a critique of last year’s Catherine, where systems fail the nuance about relationships it aspires to. Meanwhile, Kyle Chayka says we can find the art in games from a more unconventional place– perhaps in reading Cooking Mama as performance art?

There’s a satisfaction in the rhythmic nature of the different tasks that have to be performed, and there’s always the goal of pleasing Mama and besting your previous score. But there’s also the abstract satisfaction of having created something, or the simulation of something, that someone else is going to consume. Like Tiravanija’s curry, the gyoza or omelets that we make in Cooking Mama aren’t composed for ourselves; they’re created for the mystery person on the other side of the theoretical table, whomever we choose to fill that space with.

Also daring to be unconventional, Jim Ralph proposes that Skyrim is in fact a place we inhabit:

Despite the impossibility of encountering another human being in Skyrim, its players all occupy the same imagined terrain through their shared experience. In this way, Skyrim does have that population of 10 million Dragonborn. Sure, we’ll never come face to face in our different Skyrims, but I’ll probably never come face to face with 99.9% of the rest of England’s population either. That doesn’t stop England being a nation. Our experience of any community is built from a mix of individual isolation and the impression of interpersonal links. In this way, Skyrim is a nation in its own right.

From Skyrim to Tanelorn, Patrick Holleman profiles the rich community space of a Minecraft roleplaying server named for the work of fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock. Meanwhile, Krystian Majewski compares the worlds and gameplay of Suikoden and Mass Effect and discovers some interesting parallels.

Speaking of Mass Effect– you know we couldn’t go one week without touching upon the ending controversy. In fulfilling that cosmically-ordained quota, Paul Tassi sits down with the people of the Retake Mass Effect campaign, presumably so that you don’t have to. It really is a very authentic look at a dissenting section of the Mass Effect fanbase, whatever you might think of the whole issue.

Meanwhile, as we’re on the subject of big pictures, Chris Kohler digs a little deeper into some of the underlying logic of the much-maligned Consumerist reader poll which named Electronic Arts the worst company in America. While not fully satisfying a rationale, it does paint a picture of a Consumerist readership interested in far more than unsatisfactory endings and LGBT characters.

Much of the Ludodecahedron swarmed PAX East last week. Robert Yang demonstrates that his impressions of the convention roughly match up with mine of E3, then ups the ante significantly: “How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.” And that’s just the title.

More soberingly, the beautiful Mattie Brice is back at The Border House this week with a heartfelt essay on cis- and heteronormative pressures which inform not just her self-presentation as a game journalist, but her everyday life. In it, she also discusses the Vox hiring controversy and persisting obstacles to diversity hiring in the industry. A must-read.

With that, this week’s roundup comes to a close. I have to go bundle up and take some more cough medicine. Join us next week, and be sure to tweet and email us your favorites!

Links, I mean, not cough medicines. Although those would be appreciated as well.