Category: Videogames

  • Music criticism/game criticism

    So this was a really quite interesting essay (which I’ve come to quite late) by James Parker and Nicholas Croggon about music criticism, and I think it has interesting stuff to say to games criticism too. I’m thinking here about that piece by Anthony Burch recently that was very much a case of him retroactively […]

  • My oral history of videogame criticism blogging 2007-2014

    So I gave this talk at Critical Proximity a couple weeks back and tried to just share some memorys from blaggin and doing CritDist. My slides are here on the CritProx website.

  • Videogame visions of a post-climate change future

    I wrote an essay on the way games have depicted climate change for Memory Insufficient. I was pretty happy with how this turned out, and the plan is to whip it up into a more fleshed out paper later in the year. I haven’t had a chance to read the other essays but if prior […]

  • Clint Hocking on sense of place and the effect on violence in Far Cry 2

    Steve Gaynor has a new Idle Thumbs offshoot podcast called Tone Control, and in this episode he talks to Clint Hocking, and they spend about the last 50 minutes talking about Far Cry 2. I wanted to excerpt this one great little quote that I think is really important. It’s from about an 1hr 10mins […]

  • Gone Home: Jump Scares and Ludonarative Harmony

    So there’s a new game out called Gone Home and I don’t have the superlatives to describe it adequately so just take my word for it and go play. It’s some trifling amount of money on steam. If you haven’t finished playing it, I advise you to stop reading this essay now and just spend […]

  • Attention and Immersion

    A video essay about the term ‘immersion’ and why I think it should be replaced. While video of Richard Lemarchand’s GDC talk is behind the GDC Vault paywall, his slides and text from the talk are online here. I’ve received a few very nice replies and comments – Shawn Trautman wrote out some of his reservations and emailed […]

  • MLG[PRO] 420 FANVIDs

    There’s a strange, and relatively new, genre of YouTube video, based on parodying the over-serious, über-gamer culture that surrounds professional gaming, and in particular the MLG (Major League Gaming) circuit. The typical MLG fragvid is full of over-the-top special effects, in-text commentary, and often accompanied by a dubstep soundtrack, oriented towards demonstrating a certain Pro […]

  • The New Situationist International

    I read the introductory few pages of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath The Street and was immediately inspired to organise or join an artist/philosophical collective like the Situationist International. I don’t have a great understanding of them, their goals and practices, having learnt virtually everything about them everything through reading Wikipedia, a couple of chapters […]

  • A response to Dan Cook’s “blunt critique of game criticism”

    NB: Since posting this piece the original post in question has been edited to remove many of the phrases I initially took aim at. As such I now feel like the fool flailing away at thin air, so thanks for doing that to me, Dan. It is, as always, his prerogative, but it’s also exactly […]

  • Rhetorical Questions

    Initial responses to my off-hand reference to an analytic/persuasive divide in the critical videogame blogosphere ranged from incomprehension to ardent agreement, and even a blog post ‘In defence of trolling’ (about which I’m still not sure how to respond other than to say I’m flattered the author thought my ideas worth responding to). In my […]