"Where is all the good writing about games?"
The good, the bad and the ugly with the Critical Distance Confab. For those who don’t know, the idea behind these minisodes is for myself and a co-host to highlight 3 games each. These are games that haven’t gotten a lot of…
After a troubling set of weeks, it seems a lot of games critics are thinking about how escapism is more than it appears on the surface. A major theme of this week’s blogging is how games can provide a sense of release…
Welcome to another episode of the Critical Distance Confab! We are taking a mid-summer break from our series on video producers and critics to talk about Critical Distance. Senior Curator Zoya Street and I have decided to talk about the site and…
I am spending a few days staying in a cheap Bed and Breakfast in an run-down Victorian seaside resort in the North of England. It is a spooky place where nothing seems to make sense. At one point I saw a white…
It is hard, in the context of this week, to feel able to do justice to many of the themes that come up often in these roundups: queer liberation, decolonization, safe spaces, and of course, the fraught relationship between violence and media….
This week, I’m at Doc/Fest Sheffield, watching documentary films, trying out some exciting new VR projects, and listening to people talk about truthful storytelling in screen media. So far I’ve seen software allowing a holocaust survivor to keep answering people’s questions long…
Welcome back to part two of our spring season Blogs of the Round Table! In May we called for any post concerned with ‘Childhood’ and games; for June we want to hear from the other side of that relationship in posts on ‘Parenthood’! How does being…
This week there has been an upswing in articles about mental health and gaming, in no small part because of an excellent series run by Not Your Mama’s Gamer. I’m very glad to see this conversation gaining traction, and it sits well next to…
This roundup comes a little bit late, as I was kept busy this week by a conference about care and technology. As it turns out, the topic of care is not a bad lens for looking at this week’s blogging! Stardew Valley…
This week sees some fantastic thoughts on role-playing. Which roles are represented in narratives, what it would have been like to play a particular role in its historical context, and how we deal with the pressure to perform in a particular role….