Chris Avellone on RPG Conventions

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Last week saw the ‘Framework’ conference in Melbourne, and Kotaku Editor David Wildgoose attended a lecture given by Chris Avellone – he of Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 fame. In a nice recap, Wildgoose talks about…

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No Culture? Gameplay Aesthetes

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Sure, it’s about a board game, and a forgettable one at that, but Greg Costikyan makes a point that it’s important to know about the history behind even bad or un-interesting games: For what godforsaken reason are we featuring Twiggy Game today?…

Anna Anthropy on Games

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This will be the second time I’ve linked to something involving Anna Anthropy (a.k.a Aunti Pixelante), but I think she’s got a particularly different take on games and play than what we usually hear. I feel this (too short) interview highlights some…

What should games cost?

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Recently, Amazon.com purchased one of the larger game portals, Reflexive Arcade.  As part of the integration, Amazon chose to lower the prices on all the casual arcade games to $9.99.  This angered publishers , causing PopCap and others to pull their games…

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April 26th

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This Week in Videogame Blogging, 65 die in a tragic Tetris accident in NYC, and Hard-casual also get the scoop on the Fallout: New Vegas protagonist! In slightly less tongue-in-cheek happenings, Jim Rossignol, one quarter of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, noted that “Locked…

Games As the Next Avant-Garde

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Darius Kazemi, of Tiny Subversions, recently posted his transcription of a GDX talk given by Ian Schreiber on “Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde”.  In it Schreiber posits that a greater understanding of the twists and turns underlying Art History would benefit those game…

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Episode 1

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Welcome to Episode 1 of the Critical Distance Confab. The CDC podcast is a weekly discussion with a cast drawn from an irregular pool of videogame bloggers and contributors to the Critical Distance website. We discuss issues of design, culture, art, and…