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…Radiator writes the third instalment in his impressive series on the immersive simulation genre, and it’s called ‘Dark Past (part 3): Letting Go of the Immersive Sim, of flu viruses, ghosting, and why we’re all Kate Winslets at heart.’ I’m really loving the trend to produce large, drawn out arcs of critical writing about gaming, and I hope Yang and others can pick up the ball and run with it.

We value the aesthetics that systems produce (a mission) but not the systems themselves (the traveling in-between missions), aside from the occasional YouTube video of weird stuff —

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…to a place of extreme player-entitlement. …The world that players are meant to inhabit is so skewed narratively and mechanically, that nearly no illusions are present in which they aren’t ‘the special one’ (i.e. the game doesn’t even try to pretend you’re just another trainer rising to prominence).

Craig Wilson at the Split-Screen blog does more Metacritic drilling-down, looking at ‘The Console Wars’ and gussies up some nice infographics from the results. One choice quote: “Of all the games I’ve bought on steam, 53% of them I’ve yet to install and play”. I guess that says something about…

…with regards to their ultimate fate.

Unlike Alyssa, I don’t get stressed when my first person player character “dies” in Portal. Her death is impermanent; the player’s respawn is nearly instantaneous and the game replaces puts the avatar pretty much right back at the site of the player’s failure. I no more stress out about launching myself into a turret (oops) than I do about laying a jigsaw puzzle piece in the wrong corner, or about missing a move in Tetris. Portal is ultimately about solving puzzles and although there’s a great narrative framework going on, I don’t

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Welcome to another instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging, and what a week it’s been. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had so many great pieces all crammed into the one week. Where do we begin?

Our last entry went out before September 11 really kicked off the remembrance of that fateful day, so perhaps we’ll start with Mitch Krpata’s contribution for Joystick Division in which he explains ‘Why Gears of War is the Quintessential 9/11 Game’:

I’m sure Cliff Bleszinski and company would be the first to argue that Gears has nothing to

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Welcome to another installment of This Week in Videogame Blogging with appearances from some of our usual suspects as well as a few newcomers. It’s been awhile since I last curated this series—since June, if you’re keeping track—so I hope you’ll enjoy what we have on show in this week’s edition. After all, it’s only the best of videogame writing, blogging, and criticism.

To crank things up is an excellent piece by Tim Rogers on Insert Credit, in which he writes about the death of videogames as we knew them and the birth of something much more insidious.

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