August 2016: ‘Bugs’

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

Happy August, people of Earth. I hope that the dog days of your summer have been filled with trips to the beach, ice cream, and weather more tolerable than the purgatory soup oozing across southwestern Ontario. But enough small talk: if I know you like I think I do you’re here because you want to see the topic for this month’s Blogs of the Round Table! and you won’t accept any bugs in the system. Well too bad! Because this month all I want to talk about are ‘Bugs’ and the ways that they change how we play.

This month we want you to talk to us about glitches, hiccups, shortcomings, exploits and any other kind of ‘bugs’ that show up in games. Do they add character, or make games worse? Should games strive for perfection or personality? Have you ever developed a game where a bug turned out to be a feature? Can a bug really “break” a game or can it be something that draws you in? And what about those who look at them as challenges against a developer: maybe exploiting bugs is a way to insert the player’s subjectivity into a system. We want to hear your post-patch annoyances, your funniest and fondest broken moments, your unexpected trip past the boundaries of what you and the developer expected out of the experience.

I’ll also take this opportunity to refresh you dear readers on how BoRT works:

  • BoRT is an open call for submissions, you write on the topic and we’ll post your piece with the rest of the roundup at the end of the month
  • Our topics are guidelines and you are welcome to (re)interpret them liberally: for example, this month you may be more interested in writing about bug pokemon or you’re unfortunately named best friend Bug who introduced you to Let’s Plays than bugs as glitches. That’s perfectly fine!
  • Submissions may come in the form of articles, videos, podcasts, or any other method of communication that can be freely distributed and accessed on the internet
  • Your tone can be as personal, creative, humorous, academic, or absurd in tone as you’d like
  • Newcomers and professional writers are equally welcome

We also have a fancy drop-down menu to keep track of submissions thus far:

If your website supports iframes and you have one of your own, just copy-paste the following:

<iframe type="text/html" width="600" height="20" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=August16" frameborder="0"></iframe>

So with the system set down I think I can walk away and assume that everything will work out juuuuuuuuuuuuust fine. You have until August 31 to contribute. Good luck and happy blogging.

Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @thecybersteam or @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag. Happy blogging!

Suggestions for the Round Table:

  • Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
  • Think of the BoRT topic as a starting point. Connecting your piece to the topic can be as creative as you want. We’re interested in writing about play, so be playful when you approach the round table!
  • This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as we receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic 5000’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the@critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
  • As a knight of the round table we encourage you to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece and give the original writer a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going!
  • If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start.
  • You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free but we will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.