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November 8th

…comes to gaming, consider this link a fist-bump of solidarity with New Zealand gamers. The situation is (or was) that Microsoft locked a number of them out of Xbox Live downloads a few months back, and Tracey Lien takes the time to explain the whole strange situation.

Jorge Albor explores the online world of League of Legends and its online culture in ‘The Blame Game’.

Not really one to link to reviews, this section nevertheless caught my attention in John Walker’s review of Dragon Age: Origins,

…these dwarves come with a history. The younger of the

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September 20th

…a generation’s exposure to PC gaming | PC Gamer Alexis Ong reminisces about the intimacy of play communities, as mediated by the shared space of the family computer.

  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Playing Together During the Pandemic | Gamers with Glasses Patrick Jagoda and Kristen Schilt recount the experience and affordances of playing together, via Breath of the Wild.
  • The Essential Workers of Death Stranding | Into The Spine Joe Ostrander asks what work is really essential, in Death Stranding and beyond.

    • “My mother’s spirit resists easy answers, and doesn’t provide…

    September 2020

    …discussing the process of Tim Rogers reviewing Doom against his self-described history as a “Doom poseur” along with its subsequent saturation and endless iterations in American and ‘gamer’ life, the point of which is weirdly interesting because hey how do you “review” something that is now so culturally embedded? But yes, it’s very long. (Autocaptions)

    That does us for September’s edition. See you all again soon enough. Oh, but do remember to vote, American friends. (I know you will).

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    Critical Distance is community-supported. Our readers support us from as little

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    November 8th

    …Dark Descent and Player Choice | Gamers with Glasses Blake Reno studies how the original Amnesia interrogates the role of the player in guiding and judging the redemption of of the player character.

  • The Invisible Hand in The Space Between | Into The Spine Tess Everman considers horror beyond the individual and into the structural in The Space Between.
  • Amnesia: Rebirth Needed To Be More Than Horror | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative Jeremy Signor finds the latest Amnesia to be at odds with itself between its narrative themes and scare tactics.

    • “Yes, there’s plenty of…

    The Witcher 3

    …space

    One of the things that The Witcher 3 is most known for is its densely populated space as a functional game world. Although people usually appreciate this fact, it’s not often extrapolated further — when you dig into reporting on the process, you’ll find that The Witcher 3’s development was long, arduous, and difficult, and this largely influenced the stamp it has made on the zeitgeist.

    In his piece for Eurogamer, simply titled The writing of The Witcher 3,” Keith Stuart spoke to lead writer Jakub Szamalek about the complexities involved in writing a game on this

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    January 31st

    …of capitalism which Agent 47 stalks? Mixed messages, it turns out, as this week’s highlights reveal.

    • Death Is The Place | In The Lobby Cole Henry traces a topography of death and wealth in Hitman 3.
    • The Consummate Professional, or Hitman as Capitalist Fantasy — Gamers with Glasses Christian Haines concludes that even when the contracts are for the world’s most powerful capitalists, the job of a hitman is still 100% capitalism working as intended.

    “the hitman reimagines freedom and autonomy as perks of the job. It transforms the political hope of transforming or

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    February 21st

    …week | GamesIndustry.biz Mary Gushie breaks down the normalization and ubiquity of harrassment experienced by women journalists in games.

  • Has the games industry lived up to its Black Lives Matter promises? | PC Gamer Malindy Hetfeld talks to people across the industry to get a read on what steps studios and publshers have or have not taken to make their workplaces safer for and more inclusive of Black talent and leadership.

    • “In the summer of 2020, several companies in the games industry raised money for charities fighting racial injustice and released statements in support of Black…

    The List Jam Roundup

    …hype cycle or trying to establish gamer cred hierarchy, these entries really wrestled with what it means to put videogames in a list, how we sort, order and select gaming history, and even the readings that can help us make sense of it.

    • A SERIES OF INCREASINGLY FRANTIC CRIES FOR HELP IN THE FORM OF TANGENTIAL VIDEO GAME LISTS by Aristaeus890
    • Congeries (or, THE ACTUAL TOP TEN VIDEOGAMES OF ALL TIME) by Rowan Crawford
    • A Games-As-Art Reading List For the Undergraduate Artist by Cynan Juniper Orton
    • Regrets 1961-1983 by Arcade Idea

    Alternate Histories

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    April 25th

    …PC Gamer Andy Kelly talks to Lenval Brown and Cash DeCuir about finding and delivering the voice for Disco Elysium‘s narrator.

  • Profane Solidarity | Bullet Points Monthly Diego Nicolás Argüello examines the rhetorical, psychological, and social mechanisims that inform swearing and cursing in games at large and Outriders in particular.

    • “Everyone in the game’s world, from its rather talkative protagonist to the group of secondary characters that march along with them and the nameless people who fight and die in its setting’s trenches, have embraced a similar approach to swearing. These characters’ motivation for using so…

    May 2nd

    …Planet Earth — Gamers with Glasses Christian Haines considers Nier: Automata as a post-anthropocene game.

  • Enough cyberpunk—it’s solarpunk’s time to shine | PC Gamer Alexis Ong turns to a less pessimistic, less aesthetically-mined vision of the future, and to some of the indie developers bringing it to life.

    • “Perhaps the problem isn’t that solarpunk isn’t suited to mainstream perception of video games—the problem, then, is that we simply haven’t fully realized how angry we should be about our current planetary predicament.”

    Social Play

    Let’s do another somewhat abstract series, but this time, it

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