September 25th
byI’m blown away by the volume of high-quality writing this week. All the great stuff seems to be coming out at once! It’s overwhelming. To make it all a little easier to digest, I’ve broken this week’s roundup into four parts. Take…
September 18th
byI don’t look at the weekend the same way as I used to. It’s always had something of a rejuvenatory aspect, a magical means to reset the struggles and stresses of the previous week, enough to make the coming Monday more tolerable—though…
September 11th
byWelcome to this week’s late summer feast of writing on games, semiotics, and dogs. Morality First we address the moral questions explored in interactive fiction, as two critics play the politics of enlightenment. Pigmote Isle | Problem Machine The Problem Machine blog…
September 2016: Globetrotting
byAt last the dog days of summer have arrived in the good ol’ northern hemisphere. I’ve never understood that phrase but I do like dogs, so it gets a pass as far as I’m concerned. With a new month we must of…
August Roundup: ‘Bugs’
byHello again readers, it’s once again my pleasure to bring you another edition of Blogs of the Round Table! Throughout August we asked you to discuss all things ‘Bugs’. This month we want you to talk to us about glitches, hiccups, shortcomings,…
September 4th
byAfter a week of taco trucks, it’s time to settle down and digest the meaty issues in games criticism. A quick note before we continue: Critical Distance is just $40 away from the Patreon goal that allows us to stay afloat and…
August 28th
byThis week’s blogging has me thinking about how developers manage the expectations of others, the roots of protagonists’ personal ethics, and how players’ morality is shaped by the expectations of people around us. Blame, shame and guilt chase each other around the whole of this roundup, as writers…
Episode 38 – The Spawn of History
byDirect Download We are back with another interview on the Critical Distance Confab! This month we are joined by Bob Whitaker, associate professor in Modern History at Louisiana Tech University and founder of History Respawned. In 2013, he started the YouTube channel by looking…
August 21st
byWhew! There was a LOT of great writing on No Man’s Sky to get through this weekend. Pretty soon the number of pieces of writing on that game will rival the number of planets it contains. Nobody can explore them all, so I’m here…
August 14th
byThis week is all about those big, open spaces: the endless expanse of a procedurally-generated universe, the mysterious depths of the ocean, and the reimagined streets of a Pokemon-enriched city. Battlefields We start with escapism and its opposite. How do we cope…