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gamer

June 28th

…Harvey talk about the liberating feel of trying and failing to make a game for gamers.

Josh Bycer looks at game development from artistic and business viewpoints, and Rob Fahey examines Bungie’s decision to produce Destiny content without a subscription.

Elsewhere, Stephen Winson looks back at World of Warcraft’s gold economy:

But what is true in the rest of the world is true in the world of gold farming: reducing your labour costs is a fast and easy way to increase profits in the short term. And as in the physical world, farmers had three basic

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This Year In Videogame Blogging: 2016

…how we can trace culural change in the world around us.

  • What Gamergate should have taught us about the ‘alt-right’ | The Guardian – Matt Lees Matt Lees looks at how Gamergate ended up being a canary in the coalmine for the ‘alt-right’s’ tactics and ideology.
  • Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem | Latining One woman’s experiences in the tabletop gaming sphere.
  • The Ugly New Front In The Neverending Video Game Culture War | Kotaku – Patrick Klepek Patrick Klepek tries to navigate the ground of reporting on Allison Rap’s harassment without falling into

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February 6th

…aesthetics in conversation with a longer trajectory of popular culture.

  • The Process Genre in Videogames: Sunset – Intermittent Mechanism Ian at Intermittent Mechanism argues for the use of Sunset as teaching material.
  • The 63-Year-Old Retiree Who Broke A Game Looking for The End of the World – Waypoint This is an unusual piece. Lewis Gordon interviews an elder gamer about his recent indie gaming experiences and his history with early 1980s PC gaming.
  • The many faces of DOOM’s afterlife • Eurogamer.net Alex Wiltshire interviews several developers of DOOM ports.

“All healthy cultures must

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November 4th

…just for having fun – Polygon Petrana Radulovic examines nested layers of misogyny in Overwatch fan videos (Content Notification: abusive gamer bro comments).

  • Worse than Scabs: Gamer Rage as Anti-Union Violence | Rhizome Lana Polansky digs deep into the designed built-in precarity of games industry labour, and how publishers quietly leverage gamer rage to keep their workers afraid and exploited. This one feels especially timely given the absolute meltdown people are having this weekend over Diablo Immortal.
  • There Are Not “Too Many Games” – Deorbital Liz Ryerson demystifies the Indiepocalypse as a monolith by discussing the various economic,…
    • Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    October 24th

    …what it’s like to put your ideas out there on the internet about these crazy things we call videogames:

    I never felt like I found my voice when I wrote for Graffiti Gamer. It wasn’t just a place to dump words, I tried to write like I had something to say, and to make it entertaining, yet I was forever doubting the validity of each topic and every word. Posting to Graffiti Gamer felt like a return to adolescence. It was a place to voice an awkward opinion, to puff my chest and talk tough, pretend I was

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    April 28th

    …“Gamer” – A Critical Hit! Kate Willaert offers a deep historical dive on where the word “gamer” actually comes from, and the story has a few more twists than you’re probably expecting.

    “A group of science fiction fans pioneered games journalism, created the first US gaming magazine, and redefined the meaning of “gamer.””

    Sequence Break

    Four articles this week all revolve around breaking games in some way–either by pushing them to their mechanical limits, playing them in novel ways or for novel reasons, or in producing new games that respond directly to the assumptions

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    June 2nd

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  • Feedback Makes Me A Better Gamer–When You’re Not An Asshole | Kotaku Cecilia D’Anastasio proposes some best practices for giving feedback in competitive gaming.

    • “There’s a way to do it with love that makes your gaming community more supportive and more powerful. There’s also a way to do it spitefully, with an overtone of superiority and abuse.”

    Critical Chaser

    Oh no.

    • I Covered My Entire Body in Gamer Goo | Fanbyte merritt k gets a grip on hardcore gamer skincare.

    “Grip-enhancing products are used by weightlifters, climbers, and

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    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2019

    …write has started to become about selling ourselves as the product. We’re defining a new history by what we mean to videogames, not what they mean to us.

    History and Who Writes It

    Here’s a thing: What was the Great Videogame Crash of 1983? It’s usually posed as an important moment in (commercial) games history, but LeeRoy Lewin argued: important for whom?

    Here’s another thing: Where did the term “gamer” come from and who defined it? As Kate Willaert observed at A Critical Hit, our modern conception of “gamer” is mainly the product of advertising.

    The…

    March 21st

    …a hobby and discourse.

  • Gamer Trouble Book Club #1: O Gamer My Gamer – No Escape Kaile Hultner embarks upon a read of Amanda Phillips’ provocative, accessible primer on and intervention in the cultural landscapes of games, the industry, and academia.
  • MY LIFE FOR NERZHUL – DEEP HELL Skeleton remarks upon history–and journalism–repeating itself every time Bobby Kotick awards himself a generous bonus and Activision-Blizzard lays off a bunch of people.

    • “Looking at Blizzard now, all of the original staff have left, or been folded into mobile games and esports marketing strategies departments. Former members…

    April 3rd

    …‘Norco’ Is Found in the Tenacious Weirdos Who Live There | VICE Cameron Kunzelman finds profundity in the authenticity of the people populating Norco‘s only slightly-exaggerated dystopia.

  • Norco review | PC Gamer Alexis Ong offers the highest praise to Norco as a game that approaches its bleak, hyperlocal, dystopian setting with humour and heart.

    • “On a good day, Norco is a bastion of beautifully evocative storytelling that invites any player to take refuge in its world. On a bad day, it cuts deep as a sobering, but loving portrait of a modern dystopia—a community on the…