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August 2nd

Good morning, Sunday readers! I think it’s morning. Yes? Technically. Like my cat I have lost all sense of time except dawn and dusk.

But enough of my crepuscular hunting patterns, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Academic Rigor

Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson parses the data (video) on a recently released study, which suggested that men who harass women in online games tend to be unskilled players. Watson’s conclusion? It’s a little more complicated than that, and could certainly benefit from a larger, more nuanced dataset.

Elsewhere, the newest issue of Game Studies has

July 2015

Hello, my friends! In my continued effort to re-emerge from hiding after my (successful!) PhD qualifying exams, I am back with another month of LPs! Before we get started, I want to extend special thanks to Riley MacLeod for taking over in June and also for just being an awesome person.

There was a lot of great content this month, so let’s dig in and see what July brought us This Month in Let’s Plays:

Systems and The Meanings They Create

In the latest addition to Stephen Beirne’s Two-Minute Game Crit series, Beirne looks at

August 9th

Ah, yeah, it’s getting to be that time of year. When the heat feels like a damp breath on the back of your neck and the cat is shedding enough fur to produce an entire extra cat.* There’s nothing for it except to stay hydrated — and take a long easy Sunday catching up on some reading. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Mirrors, Apertures, Doors

At Offworld, Leigh Alexander profiles &maybetheywontkillyou, a game in which players physically don a black hoodie and navigate a system of racist microagressions and capricious law enforcement.

Meanwhile, FemHype had

August 16th

Where have all the flowers gone? And if your answer to that is anything but “Oklahoma!” we can never be friends. But that’s enough deep cut references out of me for one opener — let’s move ahead and get going with This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Nasty, Brutish and Short

Robert Rath, famous for his Critical Intel column, appears to have found a new home at Playboy, discussing Call of Duty consultant P.W. Singer’s very FPS-inspired novel Ghost Fleet:

Ghost Fleet is what Call of Duty would be like if it put on a tie

02: Danger

Sometimes writers independently cover the same topic, approaching a common subject from unique perspectives. Critical Discourse is our attempt to bring these perspectives together in a direct conversation, where writers discuss work their ideas together.

In this edition we invite three writers regularly featured at Critical Distance to discuss the theme of Danger. Gita Jackson opens the topic by confessing at Offworld,”I’m afraid to die in games“, where she ties her experience with danger to the simulated danger in videogames; also at Offworld, Aevee Bee writes “I love my untouchable virtual body” to argue that true empowerment isn’t

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

August 23rd

Kris is taking a well deserved break this week and has left curation duties in my competent, if grubby mitts. Why are they so grubby? Because I’ve been rummaging around the internet to bring you your weekly dose of organic games crit. It’s This Week In Videogame Blogging!

The Leaf, Still Green

On Medium, Gabby DaRienzo talks about death positivity, and looks at several videogame examples that are in accordance with its philosophy of accepting mortality:

There’s a relatively new movement that’s slowly gaining popularity called death positivity (or “death acceptance”) that is encouraging people

August 30th

Readers, do you know I’m sometimes mistaken for Australian? Don’t ask me why, with all the Zs and missing Us in my speech, but it happens.

Anyway, right now I rather wish I were an Aussie. It’s approximately “claw my eyes out” degrees with a side of wildfires here in the Northern Hemisphere, at 11pm as I write this. A change of season sounds quite nice.

Enough about the brain boiling into vapor inside my skull, though, let’s get to this week’s reading! It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Of Play and Spectatorship

At Videogame

August Roundup: ‘Nostalgia’

In the spirit of August’s topic for Blogs of the Round Table, I’ve been looking back at some older editions of this fine feature of ours. In doing so I’ve discovered that August 2015 has matched BoRT’s month of highest participation! You’d have to go all the way back to January 2013 to find as enthusiastic a response.

Naturally, special thanks must go to Alan Williamson, who came up with the topic some time during his captaincy of the SS BoRT-olomew. Now, let’s take a moment to look back at the waters we’ve sailed and consider our own

August 2015

Hello, my friends! Today I’ve been dwelling on whether or not the word “plazy” is a clever or really annoying way to describe a day spent lounging around and playing games. “Hey, Lindsey, what’d you do last night?” “Me, I just had a plazy evening in with a new game.”

Your thoughts? Yeah, you’re probably right, I should stick to curation… and with that, here’s the August edition of This Month in Let’s Plays!

Quick Crit

I’m pretty pleased with the growing popularity of micro-criticism, and as such, think it’s worth highlighting how well some LP

September 2015: ‘Maps’

The ante has been upped, my friends. Last month’s participation here at Blogs of the Roundtable was amazing. There were so many great pieces to read about “Nostalgia.” I was both elated by the response, and to be honest, also a little daunted. What a tough act to follow!

Never one to shy away from a challenge, I think I’ve risen to the occasion. Or rather, Kaitlin Tremblay has risen to the challenge! After days of trying to come up with a theme that could follow “Nostalgia,” I had a lightbulb moment. But honestly, the idea was too