February 2015: ‘Buddy Systems’

Bah, Valentines Day. More like Valen-CRIMES Day, amirite? It took me thirty minutes to come up with that intro.

Romance is great and all, but at a certain point isn’t it just better to have someone to have a coffee and shoot the breeze with? Someone you can develop schemes with in a game of The Resistance or a partner to watch your back in Streets of Rage. This month we want to hear all about all your friendships that somehow connect to games. This February, tell us about all the different ‘buddy systems’ that bring us all closer together:

As competitive as games may be, they’re equally cooperative in nature. What do games do to foster teamwork? Which game characters can you only think of as partners? Which of your friends do you depend on to share med-kits in Left 4 Dead and fire flowers in Mario? How have you used games to bond with others? On the other hand, how do games fail to bring you closer to others? Do your friends take you for granted because you prefer support classes or are you tired of having to always carry everyone else to victory? Tell us about the friendships that captivate you on either side of the screen, the mechanics that foster human contact or the systems that pull you apart.

We’re accepting blogs until February 28th. You can see current submissions here:

Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:

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

Rules of 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.
  • This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
  • Your duty as a knight of the round table is to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece, to give them a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going.
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  • 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. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.