[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s June 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] Videogame fiction, like a lot of adventure fiction for young people, places the central character in the position of rescuing a loved one. Often the loved one our hero must rescue is a damsel in distress with an implicit … Continue reading A Family That Plays Together
[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s March 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] In the last week or so my background viewing over meals and housework has been a Let’s Play of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, a gothic horror fantasy spiritually succeeding the same developer’s infamously difficult Souls series. I’m not likely … Continue reading Bloodborne and Back Pain
As editor of the second edition of “Critical Discourse” for Critical Distance (please hold your applause to the end) on Danger featuring Gita Jackson, Aevee Bee and Nick Dinicola, I was a part of another exciting letter series.1 I’ve never had any direct contact with Dinicola even though he is a colleague of mine at PopMatters but his work … Continue reading Multiplayer, Multispeaker: How We Talk About Games
[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s February 2015 Blogs of the Round Table feature] One way of looking at storytelling as a historical practise is as a simulated socialization. Anthropologically, storytelling is a way to facilitate prosocial behaviour and ideation. The point being that stories are imagined social extremes where the … Continue reading Friends that Play Together
[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s February 2015 Blogs of the Round Table feature] One of the submissions for Critical Distance‘s October 2014 Blogs of the Round Table feature comes from The Rev 3.0. The article is one of my favourite kinds of criticism; that is, it really digs into a deep … Continue reading Masks Upon Masks: Layers of Identity in Persona 3
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