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February 9th

Friends and strangers, within this post lies a treasure waiting only for you. A piece of your soul you never knew was missing, kept and stored unknowingly within the heart of another for all their life, only to be freed suddenly, to be shared with the world and to find its way to you now, to finally come home. By the end of today your spirit will be a little bit more complete.

I’m Stephen Beirne, and it’s This Week in Videogame Blogging.

Culture and Industry

Given the occasion of BioShock Infinite’s Burial At Sea DLC,

February 16th

Hi. Kris Ligman again. I seem to be taking this whole semi-retirement thing pretty hard, because here I am again. Let’s hit the books and/or bricks and get cracking on a great new roundup of the week’s best in games writing! It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Teachabilly

On Normally Rascal, Stephen Beirne contrasts a mob scene in Bioshock Infinite to a similar moment in Spec Ops: The Line:

It is forever the failing of the medium that Decisions must be made with a capital-D, structured for presentation of both sides, as if both sides

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

March 9th

Toward the latter, Mat Jones of Oh No! Videogames wants to remind us (yet again) that Pac-Man is Back, but questions whether he was actually inside us all along, deteriorating with the rest of our internal organs.

Towards the former, Polygon offers up two features from within studio development. The first: the last years of BioShock developer Irrational Games, as told via Chris Plante. The second: a brisk post-mortem of Activision’s Singularity, as told by developer Keith Fuller: “This wasn’t development, it was triage. We had to save who we could and bayonet the dying, and we had

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

April 13th

Short and sweet this week, and if you must blame someone, blame my old feed reader. The good news is, we have some great fresh faces in this week! So let’s get going with This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Racefail

Stephanie Jennings of Ludogabble has a spoiler-filled critique of BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2, which she derides as attempting to ‘redeem’ the core game in the worst way imaginable:

In this apparent effort to remedy a significant problem in Infinite, BaS2 has just found another way to further reduce the agency, power, and

April 20th

…Eurogamer, Simon Parkin again shows us his amazing skill to cast his interview subjects as empathetic without assigning judgments, in this post-mortem of the original BioShock revealing the office politics, interpersonal friction and long months of crunch leading up to its release.

Curios

At The Daily Dot, Samuel Lingle has an interesting story of how Swedish politicians have begun a tradition of competing in games of Starcraft ahead of national elections.

The Guardian Tech Weekly has posted a full-length edition of its most recent podcast, featuring an interview with Kieron Gillen on what has changed since he…

June – July 2014: ‘VINPCs’

…by your side in Skyrim or visiting your house in Animal Crossing or The Sims? Did you ever have a fierce rivalry with a faceless driver in Ridge Racer? How many attempts did it take you to defeat Goro in Mortal Kombat? Whose audio diaries intrigued you in BioShock without ever meeting the character who recorded them?

We’re accepting your blogs until July 31st. You can see the current submissions here:

Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:

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June 15th

…Eric Swain examines why, upon return to Myst, the world seems so much smaller than it did 20 years ago.

Speaking of nostalgia, by playing Bioshock Infinite in the “1999” difficulty mode, Steven Margolin realizes that perhaps Irrational Games is nostalgically holding onto what is now an outdated game design — as if it really were still 1999.

Marx

Jed Pressgrove’s argument in “Actual Marxism: Labor and Marx in Actual Sunlight” contains spoilers for Actual Sunlight, and so I will simply state that events in the game can be understood as “not necessarily intended” if understood from…

June 22nd

BioShock Infinite to get into C-D’s pages these days, but this analysis of the game’s baptism imagery from a rigorous theological perspective does the trick. (It should go without saying, but heavy spoilers abound.)

Meanwhile, as Hwang engages with baptism-as-system in BSI’s narrative, PopMatters’ Nick Dinicola criticizes Watch_Dogs‘s failure to actually incorporate hacking as a real system engaged by its protagonist.

Wizards and Glass

At Eurogamer, our own Alan Williamson pays tribute to the original Unreal.

Edge has continued to produce some great retrospectives of late, and this week they have a charming feature via Daniel…

July 6th

…a hindrance to the cause rather than a help.

Over at Kill Screen, Jess Joho has penned this analysis of games’ perpetuation of social taboos regarding menstruation, in particular BioShock: Infinite. While it’s a little cisnormative, the general points are good.

Down to the Nitty-Gritty

Over at The Escapist, Robert Rath has produced another satisfying fine-grained analysis, this time on the physics and technical hurdles that make water such a task in games.

At Eurogamer, Tom Bradwell engages with a woman commenter to discuss how that classic derail to defend marginalization in games — “it’s…

June – July Roundup: ‘VINPCs’

…a memorable experience you had with a non-player character (NPC). Were they were fighting by your side in Skyrim or visiting your house in Animal Crossing or The Sims? Did you ever have a fierce rivalry with a faceless driver in Ridge Racer? How many attempts did it take you to defeat Goro in Mortal Kombat? Whose audio diaries intrigued you in BioShock without ever meeting the character who recorded them?

Grant Howitt tells you how to save Knight Solaire in Dark Souls. I still haven’t played Dark Souls beyond the first fifteen minutes – it’s on the…