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July 3rd

This has been a big week for gaming in the U.S., with the Supreme Court ruling 7-2 to strike down the California law censoring the sale of violent video games to minors. You can read the opinions here. Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott discusses both the good and bad of the ruling. Dan Apczynski at Gamer Melodico riffs on the writing itself by making poetry out of it. And the last piece we’ll link to is Adam Sessler’s video explaining in detail some of the implications of the case.

Two pieces from PopMatters this week. G. Christopher Williams looks

September 18th

…something back? Eager to humanise themselves? Eager to soften core gamer perception of a company best known for its dead-eyed annual franchise updates, high-price DLC, and the stewardship of arch non-gamer Bobby Kotick, effortlessly the most disliked CEO by gamers thanks to his apparent disdain toward them? COD: XP is, let’s say, a smart way to both give back to the community that makes it wealthy and to counter a series of setbacks and unpopular decisions made in and around Modern Warfare.

And speaking of military-themed shooters, at Slate Michael Thomsen asks ‘Why aren’t there any civilians in…

October 2nd

Dan Bruno writes about Bastion for his blog Cruise Elroy. It’s succinct, and it touches upon the introductory portions of the game. Had he not played the game for longer than two hours, he says, he’d have missed the game’s brilliance entirely. The same, perhaps, could be said of many other games so deliberately paced.

At Second Person Shooter, Laura Michet writes about the terms “gaming” and “gamer” and what it means to be a “real gamer”, who plays “real games.” She refers of course of that familiar phenomenon of gaming elitists, whose supposedly superior opinions offer them

December 11th

…was in communication with Miyamoto and his brethren, and their excitement and optimism about the scope of their own exploits became my own.

Thus we arrive at the second overarching theme of the week: the differences between these boyhood experiences and those lived by gamers outside the majority.

We start with Kate Cox, who articulates it best:

Any discussion of gamers who are female, any kind of queer, any race other than white, or indeed any other non-dominant population tends to kick up a fuss. Some of it just goes under the heading of trolls,…

December 18th

Ahh, Sunday. I have crossed oceans of work shifts to reach you. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

The big newsworthy moment of the week deserves some equally worthy coverage. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has raised some legitimate hackles across the web, including gaming communities. Kirk Hamilton has arranged your one-stop primer, including reference to our own Ian Miles Cheong’s call to action on Gameranx. But why should you care?

Arguably, the law would be fine if rightsholders didn’t abuse it, but as we’ve seen, rightsholders are more than capable of abuse

August 5th

…disabled gamer. He says that it’s not about dropping a game’s difficulty, as many of us might believe, and relates his experience of playing Uncharted 2:

I am a disabled gamer and I am determined to keep playing. Sometimes, my disability prevents me from moving my hands fast enough to execute certain sequences in games. For example, one of my favorite games of all time is Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Near the end of the game Drake is in a Tibetan temple, in which there are levers he must crank to open doors. The way the player makes

January 20th

…solution to the problem of people who are in James Bond’s fucking way. Just like music fans look ridiculous when they insist that all the gang violence glorified in giant, flashy colors in every other rap video has no effect on the children watching them.

Our collective response, as gamers, to the accusation that video games have some connection to real violence should not be: “Nuh uh!”

In a similar vein, Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott argues that we need to take responsibility for our public image and be better advocates for games:

[This] isn’t just about…

July 2013 Roundup

…several bloggers. Should blogs be about “exploring my own issues in a semi-public forum” as Corvus Elrod says, or “something like an 18th century Salon… serious chat with nice folks” as Chris Lepine claims at The Artful Gamer?

To kick things off, I wrote about the emerging dialogue around Animal Crossing: Wild World for Split Screen. The rise of social networking has allowed us to share our opinions and fishing pictures instantly through the likes of Twitter and Facebook. But that also means that there’s less of a need for the type of ‘circular blogging’…

August 18th

…the Escapist, Jim Sterling has a video explaining diversification does not equal a neutering of creativity and how in practice it has been the exact opposite. Alisha Karabinus of Not Your Mama’s Gamer looks at what the term gamer even means anymore and how it’s loss of definition is a positive step.

Jenny Haniver chronicles her dealings with an asshole on Xbox Live and the flaccid response from customer support at Microsoft over the incident.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Naomi Clark storifies Derek Yu’s reasonable responses to the unreasonable regarding Feminist Frequency inclusion of his…

September 14th

…Both pieces frame #GamerGate well within the context of this ongoing abuse, speaking on both the nature of harassment and on Quinn’s life as a professional female artist while under this sort of duress. Both also, in profiling Quinn at precisely this time, inadvertently reveal an uncomfortable truth that we tend to only pay significant attention to women when they become the subjects of hate campaigns like this.

Putting Things in Perspective

But before I speak too soon, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun staff has soberly but boldly provided a line-by-line response to #GamerGate allegations, simultaneously debunking the misinformation…