"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Wawzonek compares contemporary efforts to digitize art gallery experiences for an Instagram audience to the slower, more intentional CD-ROM-based efforts of the late 90s.
“The Rain Room simulates the experience of a natural real-world event, sanding down the rough edges of reality to make a play-space for…
…“All 15 current and former employees Polygon spoke to, as well as the majority of workers that emailed statements through a representative, said that pay is exceptionally low, with rates as low as $12 an hour. During crunch periods, some people said they worked up to seven days a week for at least 10 hours a day. Some workers said they struggled with their mental and physical health during these times, yet felt compelled to work anyway, simply because they otherwise were not paid enough to survive.”
Next up, two authors this week look at…
…US emissions from gaming are the equivalent to putting five million more cars on the road. Electricity demand from gaming in California alone is forecast to equal Sri Lanka’s entire consumption in 2021.
Although only one part of Final Fantasy VII Remake has been released so far, all signs point to Square Enix remaining fully committed to, if not doubling down on, their original political vision. Kat Bailey writes for USGamer about the care taken to flesh out the new iterations of Midgar and Shinra as reflections of our late capitalist society: “It’s unsparing in its depiction of…
Welcome back, readers.
This week we’re plugging the Queer Games Bundle over on Itch, which brings together 200+ games from indie creators for the price of a single AAA title, and which runs for roughly a week more after this roundup’s publication. What would you like to play?
Around the site, I don’t mind highlighting our extra issue for Pride Month one more time before we head into Wrath Month. If you haven’t already, check out some great writing from throughout the front end of 2021!
This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the
…
…2021, join us on PubPub, an open-source community publishing platform, to share your micro-length essay. During that week we’ll have chats in the Critical Distance Discord server to share ideas, moral support and advice about the writing process.
Your contribution should fit into one of these four categories:
Join us on Discord Join us on Pubpub
Submissions will be published and archived on…
…you got through it. So, here from the idyllic pastures of 2021, let’s review some of the highlights of writing from the darkest year.
First, a quick note on how this round-up was made. Your Senior Curator Chris Lawrence very kindly began this process, creating a longlist of articles from their selections for the weekly roundups. I took these, plus some suggestions from readers and contributors, and winnowed them down into a mere 100 links. We accepted submissions for video, but decided that video would be better served by a separate roundup drawing on Connor Weightman’s monthly roundups. I…
…they can instill.
“I know that pining for somebody who doesn’t want…
…
For this year’s writing jam, take the format of a list as a starting or ending point, as a way to re-orient and re-think how we write about videogames. Gather inspiration from the examples in the list above, or previous games writing jams, like the Speculation Jam, Lost Histories Jam, Visual Essay Jam or Manifesto Jam. Like past jams, your writing can take a variety of forms: plain text, hypertext, comics, zines, or even short games, so long as they engage with the theme somehow. February 14th-21st, 2021 DATES:
GUIDELINES:
…about how working on the publication inspired me to create my own game—and how that in turn opened my eyes to an entire genre of card games designed to inform real-world media strategy.”
Next up, we’ve got four representational stories in and around games, looking at race, gender, age, sexuality, and language.
…argues against overtly quantified “Clementine will remember this”-style choice mechanics in narrative design, instead proposing more intuitive, constrained, dialogue-driven approaches.