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…Anthony John Agnello continues his series on empty spaces for The A.V. Club; this time with a focus on Final Fantasy VI.

Lana Polansky also looks at maps and space, but at their appropriating influence through the lens of Leonard Getinthecar’s visual art piece based on Space Invaders.

Writing for The Mary Sue, Becky Chambers, discusses how well Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead focus on morality by removing choices from in-game stat modifiers. Jorge Albor focuses his own microscope on The Walking Dead episode, “In Harm’s Way,” specifically with how Carver, the episode’s antagonist,…

…because it meshes with their worldview. suddenly they have a convenient situation that explains away all their disillusionment and misgivings with themselves and game culture.

At The Border House, Zoya Street dissects how TotalBiscuit, one of the aforementioned videogame personalities involved in harassing Quinn, has leveraged his privilege to deflect criticism.

Luke Pullen, on the other hand, looks at how gamer culture at large has taken literal fascist leaps of reasoning to protect the purity of videogames as an institute.

(End content warning section.)

Rules of Engagement

Lana Polansky pens a reminder that…

Happy Sunday, dear readers. Welcome to another edition of This Week in Videogame Blogging. This week brings us new insight into the ever-permuting face of a certain ongoing campaign which invites us to ask whether we are “winning” a cultural war, what that might mean, and where we can go from here.

General content warning: many of the pieces in this week’s post contain explicit discussion of misogyny and violence against women.

Wars and Battles, Inches and Miles

Laurie Penny perceives the ongoing kerfuffle, and by extension all the vitriol directed to women online, as

…

…ranks, contributor Lana Polansky and alumna Mattie Brice.

There has also been a recent push within certain sectors of game design academia which has urged solidarity. Over on Gamasutra’s Member Blogs, USC’s Interactive Media and Game Design chair Tracy Fullerton has released a joint statement on behalf of much of her faculty condemning the harassment campaign which has dominated the discourse of the last few months.

Finally, for a good cathartic chuckle, the ever-reliable Damien Schubert has designed a highly accurate pie chart on the true influence of “social justice warriors” on game development.

My God, Pure…