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December 2nd

…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…

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2012

…in her piece for Unwinnable “I was a Teenage Sexist.”

Patricia Hernandez fell into the same trap during a match of Gears of War where she uttered three words so common to multiplayer gaming, but offered her no solace against her opponent.

Lara Croft was an important figure to Cara Ellison, as she explains how the recent treatment of the character makes her feel in a male dominated culture.

J.F. Sargent describes how certain video game designs turn bigotry into a form of play by teaching the systems and ideas of oppression and reinforcing the status quo.

…

March 24th

…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…

June 2nd

…THIS XBONE

It’s unusual for something like NeoGAF to feature on these roundups, but this reply from faceless007 in a discussion on Xbox One’s potential effects on the used game market is a whammy.

If this industry can’t find a way to make money off the primary market — even with DLC and exclusive pre-order content and HD re-releases and map packs and online passes and annualized sequels and “expanding the audience” and AAA advertising and forced multiplayer — then, if I may be so blunt, fuck it. It doesn’t deserve our money in the first place….

June 30th

…Sean Sands got in on the act with this narrativization of a play of Crusader Kings II.

As a side note, this stuff makes me miss Bit Creature. Someone find James Hawkins some venture capital.

GAMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Slaus Caldwell recently logged into his wife’s Mass Effect 3 multiplayer account and got to experience first-hand the torrent of misogynistic trashtalk women players face on a daily basis.

Quintin Smith turned up on Kotaku in recent days decrying videogames’ overreliance on killing and win/lose states, saying that it’s stifling the medium. He offers some alternatives befitting his…

March 9th

…although anyone design-minded will benefit from them.

We start with Kill Screen, where several of its writers have devoted an entire week to the subject of game genres — in particular, where generic conventions may be going in the near future.

Games are not shoes, says Chris Bateman, who argues that Steam’s recent change to allow devs to set their own prices will not result in some catastrophic zero-sum game. And over on Unwinnable, we have the free-spirited Gus Mastrapa offering two highly exploratory concepts for the future of massively multiplayer online games.

Mirror’s Edge and Tomb…

August 3rd

…“pause,” not in the sense where games often have a “pause.” He isn’t even playing multiplayer; he is on a solo mission. “I can’t put the game down,” he explains to me, helplessly.

This, I do understand.

I am not angry with Ted. I am furious with Destiny, however. Due to a design flaw—in this case, the flaw is with a game that cannot be paused—I am finally experiencing true relationship strife.

At Eurogamer, Christian Donlan compares two unfinished, procedurally-generated horror games, Monstrum and Darkwood, looking at the various ways they succeed and fall short at…

August – September Roundup: ‘Catharsis’

…success in a multiplayer match of The Last of Us can help him negotiate difficult social situations or how failure in a game can be profoundly frustrating.

I find it helpful that there is always an opportunity for me to interact with other people without the need to engage with them intellectually or emotionally. I go through semi-regular periods of withdrawal, where it’s just best for me to lock myself in a dark room and get on with whatever needs getting on with, but it’s important to not completely detach yourself from the world.

It’s a…

Introducing: This Month in Let’s Plays!

…one on the concept of “fun”:

Historical/Preservation Let’s Plays

At this point Let’s Plays also allow us with a means to preserve, in some way, the play experience of games that – for the average player – are now hard to access due to the inaccessibility of outdated platforms.

Leigh Alexander has done some great work in this area already. For example, here’s her Let’s Play of Death in the Caribbean:

Multiplayer Lets Plays

Another advantage of Let’s Plays is that it affords the possibility of…

February 22nd

…loves guns. Conversely, cs_gonehome feels as though it’s fearful of guns. That’s because in three broad ways, cs_gonehome plays quite differently from Counter-Strike on a typical map.

And, over on 99 Percent Invisible, Roman Mars chronicles the demise of EA’s misbegotten Sims Online, and in doing so reflects on the challenges of games preservation to capture the essence of multiplayer and social games.

The Reason So Many Babies are Born in November

As Valentine’s Day covered the Earth in its rose-petaled grip last Saturday, the thoughts of many writers turned to… well, you know. You can…