I thought glasses only clinked in movies, but nothing made people get closer than $3 Sangrias and a mural of a woman lying across a pool table. Yes, it is the eve of the Game Developers Conference, or as the game industry calls it, “Christmas”. But even with such tempting distractions in store, and Google Reader threatening the existence of our RSS feeds, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Being Women’s Herstory month, the gaming community still has gender issues on its mind, and this week showed many different perspectives on the evolving conversation. We would be remiss if we didn’t include this insightful conversation between Yannick LeJacq and Rhianna Pratchett about the videogame woman of the year so far. The interview refuses to take a strong, one-sided stance on the game, as does the personal disclosure about the game from Rhea Monique:

“Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of them won’t be as lucky as I was. Some of them won’t be as lucky as Lara Croft was, either. Some of them won’t survive. Some of them will be silenced forever.

Some of them will die and some of their attackers will live.”

But for most, Lara Croft isn’t enough. Samantha Allen at The Border House outlines why enough is enough, there should be more women protagonists in videogames by now. In the same vein, Maggie Greene illustrates via her knowledge of the brave women in Chinese history, noting that the kinds of women we need in games aren’t necessarily the most obvious ones:

“I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.”

Making an unexpected appearance at BuzzFeed, Courtney Stanton explains why she isn’t shocked about the reaction surrounding Adria Richards, and in fact, has come to expect it:

“One time I was afraid to leave my house because of the internet. My unforgivable sin was refusing to just be cool about rape jokes in a gamer comic and its associated fan convention’s merchandise. Sometimes the hill you find yourself dying on is weird and unexpected; I feel a lot of empathy for Richards in this. But as final lines in the sand go, “I would like to attend a professional conference without multiple instances of men being juvenile, unprofessional, and just plain gross” doesn’t seem like an outrageous demand to me.”

In an interesting twist, Michael Thomsen makes a case against the irresponsible use of ‘dudebro,’ and how the community’s lack of rigor actually marginalizes certain experiences key to understanding the typically overgeneralized demographic of shooter fans.

Tell Me a Story I’ve Never Heard Before

The blogosphere is often grappling with the way videogames deal with narrative, and this week is no different. Over at PopMatters, Mark Filipowich extrapolates how homes are underused in games as narrative contrast and our own Eric Swain teases out similarities between cinematic time jumping and that of Thirty Flights of Loving. Line Hollis talks about how Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable work as interrogations of typical narrative structures in games and the determinism therein:

“While both games are about storytelling, they approach the theme from opposite directions. A story, traditionally, is a sequence of events that follows a chain of cause and effect. The Stanley Parable is about how story structures mock the idea of free will. Dear Esther is about how people force incomplete and untrustworthy information into story structures. One features a protagonist trapped in a deterministic world, and the other a protagonist trapped in a non-deterministic one. One of these turns out to unsettle players much more than the other.”

Worth mentioning also, back in June of last year an unnamed author over at Still Eating Oranges talked about how not all narrative structures rely on conflict, and the assumptions we have are very much ethnocentric.

It Hurts So Good

The strange relationship between pain and pleasure that games give to players has been a focus of interest with gaming thinkers lately. Kyle Carpenter at Medium Difficulty talks about the satisfying play in Trials Evolution and how it relates to J.G. Ballad’s Crash. On his blog, Robert Yang muses about how The Elder Scrolls games deal with murder and how the games set up an interesting system to communicate gravity to their murder. And thought notoriously painful, Brendan Keogh also reflects on his isolated nature in games and how Dark Souls complicates his single-player experience with multiplayer influence.

The Bonds Between Us

Relationships and intimacy is a long standing fascination of game critics, and writers continue to push our thinking on how relating can happen in games. Jordan Rivas speaks to the Citadel DLC of Mass Effect 3 and how it created a feeling homecoming, of friendship that essentially fulfilled your needs for some bonding. This time on Medium Difficulty, Mark Filipowich renews the conversation about intimacy in games through the Prince of Persia games, and how they explored the Prince’s lack of emotional bonding. Over at his personal blog, Brad Galloway shows the subtle ways sexuality politics works against diversity in the newest Fire Emblem while Matt Marrone exercises his relationship anxieties through playing Spaceteam with his girlfriend and friends at Unwinnable:

“Is your former college roommate’s wife overseeing the V-pod? She’s furthest away from you at the table. Maybe you’re not saying it loud enough. Maybe she’s never really liked you.

Or perhaps it’s your girlfriend who’s ignoring you. You’ve been training her to do it in your spare time, anyway, with your incessant rambling, and now you’ve doomed yourself to an eternity floating through the empty vacuum of space.”

Utter Miscellany

Sometimes game bloggers don’t like to be easily categorized, much like the confusing experiement that is presenting Dwarf Fortress as a museum exhibit, as highlighted here by Bill Coberly. Megan Patterson speaks to Actual Sunlight‘s Will O’Neill about the nebulously personal, but inspiring direction game development is headed. Going in a different direction, Mohammed Taher gives a detailed run-down on the influences and progress of game development in the Middle East.

And if all that was too heavy for you, perhaps instead of the top 40 lists of attractive women in tech, why don’t you try out Darius Kazemi’s ClickBait, created in response to the piece?

In San Francisco this week? Make sure to say hello to your favorite Critical Distance contributors, and come see my panel with the very timely theme of women in the games industry. If you cannot join in the wonderful festivities that is GDC, fear not, as we will be back here, same time and same place, with even more juicy videogame blogging. You can still reach us by email and Twitter for recommending good reads, which is always immensely helpful! And don’t forget about this month’s Blogs of the Round Table.

Until next time!

A little later than we expected, but here we are! Thank you for your patience while the French-Canadian down in Engineering sorted out the dilithium crystals or whatever it is that keeps the U.S.S. Critical Distance running. We’re ready to go, so full speed ahead, Mr. Sulu. Engage!

ALL THE PRETTY DEAD HORSES

Let’s get this one out of the way right at the start. Jonathan Jones catches word that more games are being inducted into New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and takes umbrage at the idea of games being featured alongside traditional art. Sophie Houlden, tired of the “are games art?” debate, reverses the question in this terribly on-point riposte:

Having situated the art on a wall in the living room, I asked Emily if there was a special way to look at it to make the art work. “No, you just look at it.” she explained, clearly as frustrated with the experience as I, “Like a TV?” I asked. The look on Emily’s face then became that look you get when you’re at risk of losing a friend, so I quickly said “Oh never-mind, I think I’ve got it figured out.” and stared at the lifeless picture, pretending it gave me a similar sense of emotion I got from actually exploring the beautiful landscapes that developers craft for their games.

After Emily left I checked on the internet and it turns out she was right, you really do just look at it, that’s all!

Where was the engagement-building interaction of games? Where was the sense of teamwork and community you get from multiplayer games? Where was the emotional investment you can only get from stories and characters that actually involve you, a real person?

BIG CHEESES

Saul Alexander has a great interview with Obsidian’s Chris Avellone up at Gamasutra.

Meanwhile, at Flash of Steel, Troy Goodfellow suggests that Molyneux is out of touch with developments in his own field of expertise.

In the wake of the Rab Florence Affair (or Doritos-gate, if you prefer), Florence has ventured to tumblr to pursue a less regulated platform for his strongly-worded criticisms. On the chopping block this week: Kickstarter, or rather the industry veterans who are increasingly turning to it to fund their games.

[T]hese capitalist animals, Molyneux and Braben to name but two, are transforming Kickstarter into a shopping website for products that don’t yet exist. They package their products with ridiculous “bonuses” that the gaming audience are paying small fortunes to secure. This is the same game audience that, just a few years ago, was laughing Bethesda out of the room for charging a small amount of cash for horse armour. And we at least knew something about that game.

DID SOMEONE MENTION KICKSTARTER

Also on the subject of the crowdfunding platform, Cliff Harris likewise has some criticisms for the “fixed dreams” it sells the comfortably well-off: “Kickstarter is the absolute poster-child for inequality amongst gamers, based on income.”

MEANWHILE IN LOS ANGELES

Here’s a nice article, courtesy of Kill Screen, profiling the upcoming LA Game Space, games’ “first high-profile residency program.” Predictably, it too has a Kickstarter. (Although arguably, this project better fulfills the intentions of the service as a charity platform than many of the greenlit projects that have gained notoriety in the past.)

IT’S VIDEOGAMES, KIDS

Critical Distance contributor Cameron Kunzelman returns to his own blog to advocate for a more inward-facing style of game criticism:

Instead of writing about the internal human process of playing a game like Dishonored, Game Centered Criticism takes the game as its own self-supporting entity. Dishonored‘s diegesis and mechanics do not exist wholly for the player–rather, Dunwall exists for itself, and its own history, just as much as it exists for me to “read” it or interact with it. It has a life of its own. It has a complex universe and being that rewards careful attention.

Obviously, isn’t a conservative appeal for Old Games Journalism, whatever that was. This also isn’t a denigration of New Games Journalism on the whole. More than anything, I’m just kind of tired of games only having worth because they were transformative for a human subject. We need a critical toolbox that allows us to talk about the digital and material qualities of games-in-themselves, not just as extensions of human minds into ludic spaces where we get to vacation sometimes.

Kotaku’s Tina Amini proposes that sometimes the most fun you can have with a game is exploring its glitches. In a similar vein, check out this humorous video by Nick LaLone which explores the same idea, of glitches as “disruption.”

Rachel Helps of Nightmare Mode reminds us that humans don’t just eat food–we have complex cultures of preparation and consumption, and games serve as a unique venue to explore that.

On Gamasutra, Nick Halme argues for a more sophisticated understanding of “difficulty.”

Michael Brough makes the unconventional suggestion that games are too mature:

The days of the arcade, where every second game was new and strange and different, are long past. (The rest were clones, but never mind those.) That cacophony of ideas has been replaced by fixed genres, mostly the fully consolidated FPSRPG – a powerfully mature setting for a certain kind of interaction and storytelling, but a very limited thing to be the main thrust of our medium.

Meanwhile, back at Nightmare Mode, Bill Coberly writes at length about how gun games miss the haptic reality of guns as physical devices, creating an abstraction which doesn’t “respect” their lethality:

Most modern military shooter-games heavily market the authenticity of their weapons and equipment. Medal of Honor: Warfighter has an entire section on its marketing website dedicated only to descriptions and photographs of the various real-life weapons modeled in the game. The implication is clear: the marketers behind these games want you to think that this is how real warfare works, and that these are the tools used by real warriors.

The idea that these are real weapons that mimic real life is contradicted by the unembodiedness of firearms in the game. Gun usage in the modern military shooter does not foster the necessary respect for firearms. By using the same grammar as more obviously preposterous games such as Borderlands, these games teach that firearms are neat toys, magic wands to be used to “solve problems” and neutralize targets. Behind their cosmetic differences, smart-talking laser guns in Borderlands 2 and AK-47s in Call of Duty: Black Ops behave exactly the same.

This lack of respect seems to foster dissonance in both discussions of military action and civilian gun ownership. Even ignoring all the other ways the modern military shooter has little in common with real war, by ignoring the physicality of the soldier holding the gun and fostering a lack of respect for that particular gun, these games gloss over the fact that real war is fought by human beings against other human beings. […] It’s a deeply physical and embodied experience, and decisions around if, when and where we should send American soldiers to shoot people need to be made with this in mind.

On a similar note, Scott Juster of Moving Pixels writes of Call of Duty‘s troubled relationship with reality.

ONE (OR TWO) FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS

Buzzfeed contributor Chris Stokel-Walker gives us a lengthy but rewarding history of Pong.

On Eurogamer, Simon Parkin furnishes us with a vibrant tale of the Grand Theft Auto player who “spilled” Hot Coffee.

LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

It wouldn’t be TWIVGB without a few in-depth critiques of specific games. Let’s get to it.

X-COM

Josh Bycer wraps up his analysis of X-COM: Enemy Unknown‘s strategic and tactical layers.

ASSASSIN’S CREED 3

Joe Flood, a Native living on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota, engages with gaming’s first high-profile Native American protagonist.

THE WALKING DEAD

Michael Clarkson digs deep with The Walking Dead‘s take on the Hobbesian “state of nature.” Also worth reading is Clarkson’s close critique of the series’s second chapter, Starved for Help.

BORDERLANDS 2

Lana Polansky experiences an unexpected paratextual gutpunch while going through the game’s campaign missions.

REVIEWING IS HARMLESS

Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line released last week to generally enthusiastic response. Now Keogh brings us a roundup of some early and very worthy reviews of his book, acknowledging what his critique does and doesn’t accomplish.

LIVE, EAT, GAME

At Unwinnable, Jenn Frank pens this emotional introspection on her work in games, the death of her mother, hanging on and letting go. Also worth reading is this very valuable B-side.

Daniel Starkey pays tribute to his own ailing mother in this Gameranx feature about dealing with his mother’s failing health through the Commander Shepard he modeled on her.

And over on Kotaku, guest contributor Phil Owen offers up this strong self-examination of his suicidal depression, unemployment, and how his gaming habits may have helped or fed into that depression.

#1REASONWHY

(This section carries a general trigger warning for descriptions of sexual harassment and verbal assault.)

One of the sweeping stories of the past week has been the #1ReasonWhy hashtag, in which women game developers, journalists and players from around the globe share personal experiences of harassment, isolation and invalidation within the game industry and gaming culture at large.

Alex Raymond starts us off with an overview of the hashtag mini-movement as well as choice tweets and links.

Critical Distance contributor Katie Williams takes to her personal blog to outline her own myriad reasons, noting finally: “Because I’m scared to post this on Twitter.”

Rhea Monique adds her own voice as a critic and a hardcore player. The women of Not Your Mama’s Gamer weigh in as well.

Tami “Cuppycake” Baribeau relates a harrowing first-person experience with industry sexism and gender inequality.

Gamespot editors Laura Parker and Carolyn Petit share a discussion on the importance of addressing sexism in the games industry.

On Gamers With Jobs, Colleen Hannon provides a good dismantling of some of the common derails and criticisms written in response to the hashtag. (Skeptical readers are encouraged to read this thoroughly before deciding to leave their own comments.)

Johnny Kilhefner storifies a virtually inexhaustible roundup of #1reasonwhy tweets from all sources.

Writing for the Guardian, Mary Hamilton shares a good treatment of the hashtag as well as the need for proactive responses to inequality. To this end we’ve seen quite a few answers: Rhianna Pratchett initiated the #1ReasonToBe hashtag, and almost immediately in its wake emerged #1ReasonMentors, designed to create a support network for women developers. Elsewhere, IndieCade speaker and LA-area developer Akira Thompson has set up Be the Solution, a new tumblr intended as “a proactive response to #1reasonwhy.”

MARATHON FOR EQUALITY

Many articles this week tackled discrimination in the industry and gamer culture at large beyond the scope of the #1Reason hashtags.

On Polygon, Tracey Lien profiles Iron Ribbon, a grassroots effort to end discriminatory trashtalk and other behavior in gaming.

Edge observes that the representation of women in the industry is at its lowest point in a decade and asks several devs and advocates how the trend might be reversed.

Emily Short provides us with an excellent roundup of women game developers both AAA and indie.

Merritt Kopas discusses using games to educate on systemic social inequality and injustice:

Because [anna anthropy's] dys4ia requires active participation by the player, it draws them into the logic of a system bigger than the individual. It gives non-trans players a tiny glimpse of the frustrations of living in a society that tells you over and over that you do not exist, and that, when it on occasion deigns to admit that you do, then drops obstacle after obstacle in the path of your desires and goals. Here, one student said that the game helped them to better understand the process of transition and all of the institutional and societal barriers involved. Another told me that the game helped them to better understand the idea of ideology as a force bigger than the individual, something that can structure one’s options and choices in life without one’s knowledge or consent.

Much has been made of tactics to remove the barrier for entry into game development. Writing for Nightmare Mode, the mononymous Porpentine provides us with a brief history, and stirring manifesto for the creation, of interactive fiction including a good Twine how-to. In conjunction with this, here’s a recommended interview with Porpentine about her Twine work Howling Dogs, conducted by IF luminary Emily Short.

Lastly, from the desk of Cara Ellison, have a poem:

Had to be screamed from the studies of businesswomen
Had to be hissed under breaths in bars in San Francisco in March
Had to be ummed by women games designers
Had to be thought in elevators at conferences
Had to be leant over a keyboard at 3am with Merlot eyes half shut
Had to be seen in absence
Had to be seen in the lack of trying
Had to be seen in statistics of applications
Had to be segregated in schools
Had to be guided away from sciences
Had to be a self-taught programmer
Our apathy and the games industry are in cahoots

*drum tap*

HOUSEKEEPING

That’s all for this week, but as always we look forward to your submissions which you can send to us via Twitter or email.

Please note that the tireless Alan Williamson is in the process of moving house so the December Blogs of the Round Table should be a bit delayed. Take advantage of this opportunity to sneak something in for November’s “origins” theme!

I’m back from IndieCade! Let’s see what you all left me. It’s time once more for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

First, some much-needed signal-boosting. I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner last Sunday with a certain Jim Munroe, writer of this year’s IndieCade Grand Jury Prize recipient Unmanned, and I would be remiss in not pointing to you to his blog, No Media Kings.

Next up, long-time reader Will Burgess wrote into us last week with the following:

I am a game designer that WAS working as a producer for 7sixty Games for the past year and a half, but I got laid off this past Friday. While I am taking the opportunity to re-build my portfolio and such, I also have a lot more free time to devote to my blog.

With layoffs seeming to come from half a dozen studios a week these days, it’s definitely a tough time for a lot of devs out there. Will, who has a background as a game studies academic, definitely lends an uncommon perspective to games blogging so it’s really good to see him making something positive out his situation. (But we’re also hoping someone has the good sense to hire him.)

On to the meat and potatoes of the links this week. First up, let’s make up for some lost time. Jason Johnson of Paste has caught up with what Jason Rohrer’s up to these days. Next, this unmissable piece from Moving Pixels’ G. Christopher Williams somehow, erm, got missed when it was first published: on brevity, death and replay value.

Over on Psychology of Games, Jamie Madigan writes on how game tutorials can be harmful to player creativity. And another Jamie, of the Dalzell variety, is up to some cool business at Pondering the Pixels, predictably pondering some pixels, namely the color language of games:

All videogames speak.

Whether it be in the blunt sentences of the First Person Shooter or the nuanced tongue of the Role Playing Strategy, every game speaks with its own vocabulary: a language that teaches us how we interact.

Yet many choose to speak the same dialect, born and bred and raised to speak the common language of the day, inspired by the dystopian landscape that is the regular videogame release schedule. […] Thankfully, then, not all developers are as allergic to colour as others, as if injected with some anti-allergy serum that saves them from the allergic reaction any other colour than drab elicits. And more often than not it’s in the ones that take a chance with colour that we see new worlds and languages brought to the videogame vocabulary, that so often stifles itself on the origins of cover and 60 Frames Per Second.

But wait, let’s talk about FPSes for a bit. For one thing, Brendan Keogh has fallen in love with a particular gun in Borderlands 2. For another, Game Church’s Steven Sukkau raises the interesting hypothesis that Halo-based machinima franchise Red vs Blue is the modern inheritor of Clerks.

Let’s telescope outwards a bit, shall we, from first-person to third-person. Kim of Co-Op Critics has been revisiting Silent Hill 2 and The Dark Tower alongside her play of Spec Ops: The Line and has some interesting reflections on how the three connect. And going well beyond game genre into the spanning world of global politics, Robert Rath explains how a global economy interconnected with Chinese censorship standards actually feeds into North Korean propaganda with fear-mongering titles like Homefront and the Red Dawn remake, saying: “In many ways, Homefront shows the North Korea Kim Jong-un wishes he inherited.”

To be certain, not all games or critical themes get a fair shake their first go-around in the critical sphere. That’s what is so exciting about doing This Week in Videogame Blogging, as it’s a good excuse to track down the sorts of articles on the kinds of games which unfortunately got overlooked on first release. For instance, take this fantastic metanarrative reading of Kingdom of Amalur by Matt Schanuel, or this meaty, deep reading of The Last Story by Andrew High.

Other games have gotten a fair bit of critical play, like thechineseroom’s Dear Esther, but new perspectives and critical takes are always popping up. Take this piece from our own Eric Swain:

Dear Esther isn’t your traditional horror story because it isn’t within the work itself that the scares reside. It’s what you bring out of this ghost story into the real world that scares the most.

Meanwhile, Adam Bishop offers up a point of view we don’t often consider with respect to Dear Esther: how game-breaking bugs or other flaws ruined the experience for him.

Over on Unwinnable, Chris Dahlen is teaching his youngster history via Civilization:

The king of not-really-educational games, the behemoth that I’ve been keeping in my back pocket since the day my son was born, is the Civilization franchise. If you’re a gamer parent, you probably have it on your list as well. You save it until your kid is old enough to enjoy it and, natch, conquer it – because nothing would make you happier than watching your child master its strategies, assimilate its lessons and rise to its challenge as a player who’s empathetic, wise and strong.

Civilization is loosely modeled on the history of the world, but when reality and gameplay come into conflict, gameplay always wins.

Meanwhile, back with G. Christopher Williams, Williams also found his teen daughter sporting a heretofore unseen interest in games recently. It’s very cute:

She entered Jerusalem and began stalking around an area that had a guard watching over it. She clearly wanted to proceed but was having trouble figuring out how to bypass the guard. “Kill him,” I said. “I don’t want to,” she replied. You’re an assassin,” I insisted, “You kill people.” “I don’t know how,” she responded. I realized that she didn’t really understand the mechanics of a stealth kill at this point and asked her to pass the controller over. I walked her through stealth killing that guard, then moved to a nearby rooftop and showed her how to take down a guard from such a vantage point before handing the controller back to her. She was soon on a gleeful murder spree throughout that holy city.

My wife called for her to take out the dog. “I can’t, Mom, I’m murder-urdling people,” she called back.

Awwww.

While Williams teaches his daughter the assassin’s creed, Aaron Gotzon is musing over some other big issues: “is it possible to draw moral teachings from videogames? ‘Life lessons,’ if you will? How might our experiences with games change if we let the games change us?”

On the subject of lessons, Richard Moss is not so much interested in the moral and ethical ones but the creative and design questions, encouraging designers to go digging through the archives. Also recently, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt touched upon a personal favorite of mine when he wrote of the recent HD rerelease of NiGHTS into dreams…, saying there is plenty we can still learn from the unique little title.

On the subject of 90s games, meanwhile, Matthew Weise reflects on how hardware of the era informed a particular aesthetic and mood of darkness. He sums it up pretty neatly in his opening words: “Darkness isn’t what it used to be.”

In light of the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown releasing last week, Eurogamer’s Alec Meer delivers an unflinching retrospective on the original and how it stacks up– or doesn’t. Meanwhile, as part of the latest issue of the Games Studies journal, Carly A. Kocurek takes us on a look back at 1976′s Death Race, “the United States’ first video gaming moral panic.” In doing so, she asks a pretty pointed question: why do some kinds of violence get a stamp of approval in our consumable media, and not others?

Speaking of the provocative, Danielle Riendeau sat down with artist-activist-provocateur-professional-troll Johannes Grenzfurthner (whom I also had the pleasure of shaking hands with at IndieCade– and playing Massively Multiplayer Thumb War with) regarding 2012′s Arse Elektronika, “the world’s first sex-positive, sex-focused gaming conference.”

But if you’re saying to yourself, “That’s the most surreal article on games I’m going to read this week,” think again! Because have I got something for you. Did you know President Barack Obama has been trying to brush up on his vidya? And that he came to Bit Creature’s Richard Clark for a few lessons in gaming?

Now you do.

One last link for the road, shall we? James Dilks recently profiled JournoDevSwap for Kill Screen, a 48-hour game jam which answers the burning question hundreds of bitter, spiteful, overworked men and women have tried to put to rest over the years: what’s harder, being a game designer, or a game journalist?

(Spoiler: they’re both harder than either expected.)

That’s all for this week! Remember to shoot us your links by Twitter or email, and that we do absolutely welcome (and encourage) a bit of good old fashioned self-promotion. So you have no excuses.

Also, Alan Williamson is absolutely distraught over how few of you have submitted material for this month’s Blogs of the Round Table so far. As in, none of you have. Get on that! Or we’re going to have to have Words.

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!

I’m all out of clever schticks this week, so let’s just get right to it. It’s time for the best and brightest of videogame commentary and criticism, This Week in Videogame Blogging!

We start off by checking in with our friend Sebastian Alvarado, who is onto the second installment of his Gamasutra blog series on nanotechnology in videogames.

Articles on Dear Esther are still trickling in, but Tommy Rousse came out on top this week with a strong critique of the “walk’em up”‘s shortcomings: “While Dear Esther does a superb job of conveying a sense of place on the island, it makes very little effort to create a sense of embodiment.”

Meanwhile, thatgamecompany’s latest PSN release, Journey, has garnered some interesting responses for its singular aesthetic and themes. Jamie Love praises the game’s unique take on multiplayer:

Journey cuts [...] to the raw source of motivation and hope we find in others, to the fact that our existence on its own is not enough to necessitate that we continue for our own sake. Certainly we live for ourselves to project strength and obey the demands of our DNA, but beneath that skin, we always hope for others to connect and share the journey with, strangers that we’ll never really know, but who when you strip external constructions away, are perhaps exactly the same as us.

Over at Moving Pixels, Scott Juster echoes Love’s sentiments, saying the game gave him “a fleeting glimpse at a kinder, more optimistic side of random matchmaking [...] It was a short, but refreshing trip that left me with a pleasant thought: given the right context, gamers (and people in general) aren’t all that bad.”

Bart Simon is more wary, suggesting the game’s design –and the words of its lead designer– reveal a dangerously paternalistic attitude:

If players have a yen to slaughter rather than help each other then it is not because the ludic abstraction makes us a blank slate of stimulus-response (psychologists rankle me more than moralistic game designers I think) but because we have cultural predispositions for what to do with these machines and these virtual worlds that have been building up layer by layer over many years… the goal of design should not be to somehow get underneath, or behind or above these dispositions but to meet them head on… to reflect them perhaps, or to make them an object of conversation and reflection. But to deny them? To only allow them to perform warm fuzzies and group hugs? That’s SoCal New Agism for you… but it’s also a Clockwork Orange.

If you have been steadfastly avoiding game publications these last few weeks, you may have missed the growing torrent of discussion regarding Mass Effect 3‘s controversial endings. The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers has a fairly spoiler-free primer if you wish to better understand the fan perspective.

And two other talented writers, Valerie Valdes and Kate Cox, offered up their views, placing the game in the context of older media. Valdes begins by discerning between “primary” and “secondary” epics and how Mass Effect 3 fulfills the description of a primary epic in the classical sense. Meanwhile, Cox likens the story to mythology in the broad sense and Christian narratives in particular, suggesting the ending has frustrated players because it cannot be interpreted in the same literal fashion as the rest of the franchise:

[T]hat it is where we find Shepard in the end: on the plane of mythology, removed from the plane of men. And that is also where many players feel they lose Mass Effect, because until the final moment, the plane of men has been the only ground the game knows.

Lastly on the subject of Mass Effect, I don’t know who this pretty lady is, but a few of you wrote in recommending this link as a capstone to the discussion: “In which Squaresoft wrote a Bioware game.”

While most of the ludodecahedron spent the week effecting masses and taking journeys, a few more interesting discussion topics sneaked in. Jamin Warren sat down with Jesper Juul on the subject of failure in games. Nightmare Mode’s Johnny Kilhefner took a trip to the Smithsonian Art of Games exhibit. And Radiator’s Robert Yang attended Sleep No More in New York City and wrote at length how the interactive experience relates itself to games.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me refer to myself as the Fourth Horsewoman of the Ludodecahedronpocalypse. I’m not sure who the first or third ones are, but the second is Maggie Greene, Kotaku veteran and academic, who responds to Christian Higley and Brendan Keogh‘s noteworthy posts from the week with some much-needed perspective on the subject of “making it” as a game journalist (or in any field). Highly recommended for any apocalypse you are attempting to bring about.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s offerings as much as I have! Remember that recommending your own or another writer’s work here on TWIVGB is only a tweet or an email away. Seriously, your submissions are our sustenance. Feed me, Skinner!

In 2012, the greatest game developers and journalists in recent memory assembled in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. Meanwhile, those unfortunate few who did not attend explored the web, discovering the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization known only as the ludodecahedron. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new discourses on games and gaming culture.

They called it the greatest discovery in human history. The civilizations of the galaxy call it…

That’s right. While our own Ben Abraham was having his elbows rubbed at GDC, yours truly has been at home chained to a day job–and a certain game about effecting masses. Let’s get right to it.

Dan Cox leads the way this week with an interesting podcast featuring two of the Critical Distance team, Eric Swain and David Carlton, as well as several other stars in a conversation on the nature of play.

As for the past week’s biggest AAA release, Mass Effect 3, we’re already seeing a host of interesting commentary, but this analysis of the ideological dissonance of the game’s single- and multiplayer takes top billing. From author Taekwan Kim:

[The singleplayer campaign is] a case where mechanics, player assets, and narrative all work in concert to deliver a concentrated and tightly knit message of the need to cooperate, or at the very least, overlook personal and petty issues for the sake of the greater good.

This message comes apart in the multiplayer, mainly as a result of the way it measures player performance. Immediately, the fact that it measures performance at all with respect to other players makes its goals clear: it’s about competition. And in this case, it’s not only performance competition, but also competition for limited resources, which tends to cause selfish play—exactly the kind of experience that is the direct opposite of the authorial message of the singleplayer game.

Two authors took an especially fine-toothed comb to game aesthetics this week. The first article arrives from the endearing Eric Lockaby, who responds to Phil Fish’s GDC remarks with the declaration that the culturally-inscribed aesthetics of games across markets are more important than we realize. Quoth Lockaby:

Western gaming culture’s complete dismissal of another culture’s artistic structure on the grounds that JRPGs are, generally, crap fails to recognize that our culture is otherwise slipping into a loving death-embrace with the cognitively simpler mode of expression–pure, animal-like signification–over the inherent complexity of abstraction.

Meanwhile, Martyn Zachary is at it about The Binding of Isaac again, but he’s moreover interested in dismantling the idea of games as ideologically constant:

That a meaning should exist within the game not as a coherent, harmonic givens, but a function to be performed, construed, and even analysed, can be a puzzling, even angering proposition.

[...]

Ultimately, however, reacting negatively to the actual question of meaning is to me a sign of immaturity and wilful ignorance. In choosing explicitly not to entertain the potential emergent meaning(s) of video games, the commentators – players, journalists, developers, critics and researchers alike – are nipping a constructive discussion in the bud.

With that we switch gears to perhaps the most recognized face among narratologists, Janet Murray, who last October delivered a talk at Georgia Tech about her landmark Hamlet on the Holodeck and developments in “interactive storytelling” since its publication. The video from the talk is now available to view here.

Another, albeit newer, recognized voice in the gaming discourse, Bob Chipman aka MovieBob, is back this week with a new video on sexism in nerd culture. In the interests of accessibility, Alex R at The Border House has provided a full transcript along with the video.

Amanda Lange responds to Commander Shepard Mare Sheppard’s GDC talk on Women in Games initiatives, presenting her misgivings about a game industry “meritocracy”:

[Sheppard] believes that the game industry should be a society where each person is promoted according to her (or his) skill levels, and the best person is always chosen for any given job, whomever that person might be. The problem here:

Who decides what is the best?

And more critically:

Who decides what skills it is most valued to be best at?

We close this short-but-sweet roundup with an Ebert chaser, and why Owen Good thinks we should just collectively agree to ignore the man for good. Sound enough advice, but why are we still writing articles about him, then? Paging Eric Swain…

Have a safe trip home, all you GDCers, and a restful week full of shooting aliens, if you can manage. Remember that all tweeted and emailed links go toward the allied war effort against the Reapers! Reporting for Westerlund News, I’m Khalisah Bint Sinan al-Jilani.

Please not the face. Anywhere but the face.

It’s cold outside, but baby, it’s warm in here. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Before we begin this week, please read our new Terms of Service agreement. Feel free to come back once you’ve signed. (What do you mean it’s just a Gamers With Jobs post? Quit bugging me, kid.)

There. First for the week, one short announcement: Medium Difficulty is doing a Call for Articles, deadline slated for January 20th. You can find out more about it here.

Now we swing by our friends at Second Quest, where Eric Brasure and Richard Goodness recently sat down for a podcast with the Brainy Gamer himself, Michael Abbott.

Next stop, MIT’s GAMBIT Lab, featuring a three-part talk on games as an aesthetic form.

This leads us into our first major topic of the week, aesthetics. It’s a theme next followed up by James Hawkins at Joystick Division, as he takes us on an excellent breakdown of the comparative aesthetic and narrative strategies of indie game darlings Bastion and Limbo:

This is where the strength of the video game medium truly shines. We’re given two adventure stories about unremarkable children set inside ruinous places, searching to restore something that has been lost. But because of the aesthetic interactive nature of video games, themes of loss, fear, and reconciliation can be conveyed to us in contrasting methods. They resonate with our innate proclivity to sympathize with one another, with that resonance being heightened by the character of the worlds we reside in.

Further in this vein of aesthetics and storytelling, we have two pieces on the narrative strategies of (wait for it) Skyrim. At Eurogamer, Rich Stanton contrasts Bethesda’s latest with the recent Dark Souls, concluding that one offers far less narrative sophistication than the other. And at Gameranx, our own Katie Williams discusses how, in contrast, the game’s prologue works to completely captivate the player.

Finally on the subject of game aesthetics and the power to grip players, Jim Rossingol has an evocative retrospective on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:

The message for the games industry is clear: you don’t have to have pretensions to art – because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense – for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But, more importantly, Stalker is a example to designers that there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They can be slow. They can involve wandering. Even contemplation.

Adrienne Shaw speculates on the existence of a “charmed circle” of gaming sociability, using sexual taboos as an analogy. Elsewhere, Karen Bryan riffs off Jesper Juul’s book A Casual Revolution to address the book’s implications in RIFT.

Aaron Matteson pays tribute to the childhood inspirations for Zelda and Pokemon, in doing so describing the boyhood exploratory spaces previously drawn upon by Henry Jenkins, among others:

[T]he more anecdotes of video game designers drawing from their lives as children that I hear, the more I believe in the medium as not self-serving but deeply communal. Because I played these games, felt those things as a kid myself. Even if I didn’t have the wilderness of Japan, I had this amazingly crafted vision of a child’s experience of that — with the embellishments and exaggerations that a child’s mind can lend to any experience. I was in communication with Miyamoto and his brethren, and their excitement and optimism about the scope of their own exploits became my own.

Thus we arrive at the second overarching theme of the week: the differences between these boyhood experiences and those lived by gamers outside the majority.

We start with Kate Cox, who articulates it best:

Any discussion of gamers who are female, any kind of queer, any race other than white, or indeed any other non-dominant population tends to kick up a fuss. Some of it just goes under the heading of trolls, or “haters gonna hate.” But what’s most disappointing and frustrating to me is when gamers who could, in theory, be allies say: “Why don’t we just talk about the games? Whatever happened to having game sites just be about games already?”

Because for many of us out there who aren’t the “right” sort of gamer? It has never, ever been “just” about the games.

(Emphasis from the original text.)

With this quote in mind, we move over to TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s essay “‘We’re Grinding Like Everybody Else’: Race, Video Game Culture, and New Media Authorship”, a most excellent critique of male white normativity in the construction of the “gamer” image:

What conclusions are we to draw from the finding that “Latinos, who play more per day than whites and form 12.5 percent of the population, are only 2 percent of characters”? Or, of the fact that low-income families play more games than high-income families? If it is commonly remarked that violence, racism, and sexism sell in games, and people of color, along with the economically disadvantaged, are playing games the most, is this ironic? Tragic? A cultural embarrassment?

On a more positive note, Keith Stuart has a profile on women game designers– including women of color, such as Mitu Khandaker (follow her on Twitter!).

Shifting gears from players and designers to player characters, Drew Dixon observes an underlying problematic assumption in the Playstation Long Live Play commercial. Also writing for Paste, the most prolific man on the Internet, Brendan Keogh, pays tribute to choice and consequence in ICO. In a similar vein, Amanda Lange profiles the very concept of failure as it applies to games: “Failure is boring – the credible threat of failure is very exciting.”

Our last stop for this evening draws us nearly full circle back to an academic perspective on games and pedagogy, with Yam San Chee’s paper: “Learning as becoming through performance, play, and dialogue: A model of game-based learning with the game Legends of Alkhimia“. A dense read, as you would expect an academic paper to be, but very valuable all the same.

That’s all for this week. As a reminder, Eric Swain is once again heading up This Year in Videogame Blogging and he needs your submissions! With your help we can save Christmas A Generic Winter Solstice-Related Holiday. So send us your links!

Stay toasty (or, for our south-of-the-equator friends, stay pleasantly cool) and we’ll be seeing you all again this time next week!

Do you believe in life after Ben Abraham? I hope you do, because it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

As Ben wrote earlier in the week, I have taken on his role as the new senior editor of TWIVGB. Let’s all give Ben another hearty round of thanks for the 2.5 years he’s devoted to our little project and the fantastic things it’s done for the discourse of game criticism and commentary. Then thank yourselves as well– because like always, these roundups could not exist without YOUR important contributions each week.

We start out this gorgeous Sunday with Kate Cox, who has been giving Dragon Age: Origins another try. Her latest entry is a commentary on the sheer diversity of possible stories and the unexpected ways players are able to fill in the blanks in the game, referring in particular to her own noble character’s class privilege.

Speaking of Dragon Age developers BioWare, Tadhg Kelly of What Games Are has a piece up on them as well, arguing that the RPG genre is defeated by its own emphasis on systems:

The roleplaying game profoundly struggles with its ambition toward art because its play is full of this sort of generalised mechanical play. It is pretty bad at evoking intended emotions within players (as Tolstoy would say it perhaps) because it’s so busy being a giant accounting exercise. So supposedly significant moments in the narrative and the actions of gameplay are in conflict with one another.

In a similar vein of toolsets and systems, and just in time for the official release of Minecraft, Matthew Briet laments that the game is just too addictive for its own good. Elsewhere, brill.iam notes that a categorization system like the one we’ve set up for videogame genres unfairly impoverishes their expressive range. In particular he poses this scenario:

If SimCity had come out after Starcraft, would it be criticized for representing a city-building sandbox? Would it be panned for having no competitive multiplayer aspect? It is, after all, a strategic game (in fact, I would argue that the layers of strategy outclass those of most RTS games that came after it) and it plays out in real time. But RTS means one very specific thing now: little buildings that make little men that kill other little men faster than another person can make other little killing men. This concept of how representation should inform design is completely backwards.

And my old blogmate from Moving Pixels, Kirk Battle (aka LB Jeffries) is back again this week with a critique of Modern Warfare 3‘s dreaded on-rails structure keeping him from appreciating the game’s littler details for their own craftsmanship: “Content Degradation”.

Keeping with our general theme of systems and the greater apparatus of game mechanics, Katy Myers has a lovely little article that is close to my heart: if graduate school is a competition, and most games are a competition, why not game grad school? It’s an interesting, if depressing, notion, as Myers’s numbered proposals feed right into conventional “incentivization” models typical of that much-maligned word “gamification”–which leads me to this next exciting piece from Tom Ewing, on de-gamification:

D&D has – as you’ll know if you ever played it – a vast and hydra-headed system of rules. At first we would modify them, as almost all players did – dropping the ones that weren’t fun. But eventually we abandoned the rules entirely, shifting to what used to be known as “freeform” gaming – something more like interactive storytelling.

The reason we did this is that we’d reframed the aim of the activity to be creative rather than simply competitive or even co-operative. Once we’d done that, the game mechanics became a hindrance to play, rather than a spur.

[...]

The implication of this is that once you have people who are confident with what they’re doing and enjoy it, there may be something to be gained by degamifying their environments – handing over more responsibility and autonomy to the players, dialing down the rewards and rules structures you’ve put in place.

While Ewing caveats that this observation is based strongly on his own gaming experiences, the essay addresses many other good points, like the usefulness (or rather, the lack thereof) rewards for the seasoned player.

Over on Edge, a more industry-oriented article tackles the ethics of overpromoting a bad game–such as the one in its header image.

And Gameranx is offering up some truly quality work lately, with three stand-out articles all written by Critical Distance regulars. From Sebastian Wuepper, we have an examination of the American action game’s fetishization of “big bads” like Nazis and Communists, arguing the latter has now succeeded the former as the FPS gamer faceless enemy du jour. From Rowan Kaiser is an essay comparing and contrasting the original Deus Ex with Human Revolution, arguing that HR is “a remake of a classic that has the rough edges shaved off for mass, not cult, consumption”. Finally, Brendan Keogh treats us to the virtues of grinding in Dark Souls.

We leave off with a glance back at one of the bigger “discussion” topics from the week, namely Kotaku Editorial Director Joel Johnson’s controversial post defending the content of his fine publication. Mattie Brice (whose recent “Speaking in Accents” article is also a recommended read) led the pack with an open letter to Johnson at The Border House. This was followed up by Richard Goodness over at Second Quest, who criticizes the tone Brice takes and suggests instead that women and LGBTIQ gamers need to push harder for fair treatment and representation, citing the Women’s Social and Political Union’s motto, “Deeds, Not Words”. A third essay from Jenn Frank at Infinite Lives argues for the middle path between the two, concluding, “Kotaku cannot, will not, be a ‘safe space’ tomorrow. And that’s maybe the real point: Kotaku has always tried to maintain its finger on the pulse, and the fact that Kotaku is changing tells you things are changing.”

And that seems like enough meta to cap off one linklist! Enjoy your week, everyone. To my fellow Americans, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving. And for all of our readers around the world, thank you, as always, for your amazing support. Remember that you can submit your own links to us via Twitter or email! (Non-perishable food items only. Spay and neuter your cats and dogs. This week’s TWIVGB brought to you by the letter Y…)