TWIVGB style guide

What can you do to make sure your roundup looks and feels right? You start with an introduction that opens with a rhetorical question or an agenda-setting statement that summarizes some of the most important topics in this week’s writing. This must be the very first sentence, so that it is captured by the site’s theme as an excerpt for display on the front page. Alternatively, if you’re more familiar with WordPress, you can use a custom excerpt to give yourself more flexibility.

You can name the h2 headings anything you want

Give a brief description of what’s going on in this section. One or two sentences will do. This is an opportunity to explain why this topic is important right now, but a bland description is fine.

Blockquotes shouldn’t be too long, usually 4 lines in the back-end editor is a good maximum. I wonder how many characters that is? Let me keep on writing in here until I hit four lines and then I can tell you. A blockquote should either demonstrate an article’s main argument or highlight a particularly notable moment that might be away from the main thrust of the piece. Okay this is about 400 characters.

Most h2 headings have an id tag

This is a bit technical, so if you’re not familiar with HTML don’t worry about it 

Spoiler drawers are useful for multi-link content warnings
The <h2 id=”heading tag”> should be the same as one of the tags for the post – conversely, each post tag refers to one section in the roundup. We have a few that we’re using quite often in order to make the site more navigable, so try to use the more popular ones as far as possible. The full list is here.

  • Temporality | Critical Distance
    Between vintage games collections, retro aesthetics, and the increasing interest in games from the museum sector, the position of games in their own time is a topic close to many people’s hearts. Games themselves are a medium that plays with time, inheriting questions of pacing and anticipation from cinema.
  • Inclusivity | Critical Distance
    Who is left out of games? Who wins and who loses? And how do the boundaries shift? Inclusivity is a major topic in games criticism, and there is still much work to be done, through proactive interventions and critical reflection.
  • Sociality | Critical Distance
    How do people involved in interactive media interact with each other? What kind of social structures are we designing when we design games? This is a topic of interest to sociologists, community managers, and anyone with a stake in multiplayer gaming.

If you want, you can replace a blockquote with an embedded video, or an image, or a gallery of images. Senior Curator Zoyander Street is particularly keen on images, because it opens the possibility for using one of the images as the featured image for the post. However, this should only be done when the link in question is a visual essay of some sort, such that the images are “quoting” the original post’s argument.

More post metadata

If the roundup doesn’t use images to quote from a visual essay, then the featured image should be one of the standard black-and-white abstract featured images (some of them kind of look like a bird on a cliff). You can find these by searching “featured” in the menu that comes up when you click “set featured image”.

  • Author name
    Should be set to the curator or guest curator’s name.
  • Category
    Should be This Week in Videogame Blogging
  • Post title
    Should be today’s date. Yes, this is redundant and bad for SEO, and we might change it in future.

Plugs

Reminders of stuff we’ve done in the past week on Critical Distance, such as podcast episodes or Blogs of the Roundtable things, as well as any links that promote the contributor’s work, all go below a hline and under an h2 heading that makes clear that they are promotional.

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