"Where is all the good writing about games?"
This episode of the CDC Podcast is extra long to make up for the missed days in releasing last week’s CDC Podcast. This week we discuss genre in videogames by starting off with the Western and eventually interrogating the role of genre…
Flower was released three months ago, and has spawned an amount of discussion that is quite disproportionate to the game’s brief length. Given all this, we thought that it was time for a Critical Compilation on the subject. If you’re aware of…
A short ‘n’ sweet one for This Week in Videogame Blogging. Not because no-one wrote anything good but because I didn’t keep my usual close tabs on the regular blogs I read. C’est la vie! As always, TWIVGB makes no claims to…
In a recent post at his blog The Inbetween, Mike Nowak bemoans the gap between intent and action which appears when game controls are more than usually complicated. Nowak notes that the unwieldy button combos in the Street Fighter series would seem unacceptable…
Welcome! Welcome! Pull up a pew – anywhere will do. Let us now pray and give thanks to The Gods of Blogging About Videogames for this bountiful harvest of tasty reading we are about to receive. Today, we give thanks for the…
Dear Critical Distance Readers, Contributors and Interested Parties, What is Critical Distance? What is its purpose and what is its aim? What gap in the field, what niche of interest, does it serve to fill? These are questions I have been asking…
Alex Raymond, of the While !Finished blog at the Iris Gaming Network, explains how games have established a rather simplistic view of relationships in her post “Women Aren’t Vending Machines: How Video Games Perpetuate the Commodity Model of Sex“: What the vast…
It has arrived! Episode 3 of the CDC Podcast. This week we discuss the approaches to videogame narrative, specifically the differences between showing and telling narrative in games. We have a very special international cast this week. So sit back and enjoy…
Soren Johnson discusses a number of lessons he learned from Sid Meier during his time at Firaxis. All four observations are good, but the third and fourth are especially resonant for me. Calls for thematic simplicity and “show, don’t tell” have grown…
Welcome to another exciting instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging. Before we dive in, I should probably explain how I go about compiling this list of the best stuff from around the blogosphere from the week. It goes something like this:…