Hey everyone - I'm coming up on a year of writing a weekly newsletter about the video game industry.
I must have read at least a couple hundred articles over the last year, and there's definitely a few that have stuck out to me. I compiled the ones I enjoyed the most (or wrote myself) and gathered them in this handy airtable.
Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter if you're so inclined to stay up to date on more content in the future: www.pausebutton.news
This is the worst presentation of a listicle I have ever seen.
There is no introduction to tell me who is selecting these articles and why I should believe their claim that these are the best articles on this subject.
It’s displayed as a spreadsheet that’s far too big to fit on my screen even if I rotate the tablet horizontally; I have to scroll all the way to the right to read the brief summary of what each article is about.
And I cannot scroll vertically. At all. I drag the screen and it just tries to select the cells, or scrolls whichever column I’m pressing on left and right a little.
Seriously this is hilariously illegible and unusable on the iPad that I am looking at this with. Dump this into some other format that actually gets reflowed properly.
Appreciate the feedback - I use Airtable to organize a lot of my own information, so I figured it'd be useful for sharing articles as well. Unfortunately, it's not the best medium for mobile.
I'm on a windows laptop and didn't even realize that there were links listed on the right side until I started writing this link and went back to check that it was a pain to find the link.
So it isn't the best medium for laptop either.
Display issues aside, I personally find this format far superior to a typical listicle you might find on the ad-revenue-driven web, with banner ads between every item and a heap of JS running on your page for no reason.
Well, there's a healthy middle ground between an ad-infested 50-page listicle and an Excel spreadsheet that requires you to scroll back and forth to get all the data.
Presenting it as a single-page text structured as:
Article name
Article source, author
Article subject matter
would be much easier on the eyes. And they could put an ad way down below if they wanted to or on the side. (Or no ad at all.)
Great list. I'm a video-game enthusiast too and similarly compile news. A few days ago I made a static site generator that delivers me my latest feeds: http://fdg.gg/news
It's really early stage but feel free to use in your own journey.
this is a list almost entirely about how video games make money. There's very little here of substance about video games as a medium, and very little that seeks to investigate how video games function as cultural artifacts. This isn't a list for people who want to make video games or who want to advance the state of video games as an art form, this is a list that only serves the capital class, and looks almost exclusively at video games through the lens of business opportunity.
The first article starts out largely about Animal Crossing, and another Animal Crossing article appears on the list, but neither even attempt to interpret the game in any way, or to consider what the game might mean and how it relates to life as we know it. Compare with this recent Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/animal-cr... and you'll see what I mean. I find this incredibly ironic, because Animal Crossing is rich in content about labor, economics, and consumerism, but these themes are taken at face value and never critiqued in any meaningful way. While the author has cobbled together a list of articles about how games make money, the list is bereft of any interpretation of games in general, even the game about making money. Nothing in this list will improve the reader's literacy when it comes to interpreting and playing games.
To simply call these articles the "best gaming articles" is incredibly self-centered, as the viewpoints expressed in this list have an extremely narrow focus, and the focus is almost universally on money-making.
I have not read you but I believe you. I crave for good game journalism, insightful enough but not academic (because regretfully academics try to optimize different metrics).The closest example I have is some pieces during the early years of RockPaperShotgun, but that site jumped the shark eons ago.
I like sifting through Simon Carless' blog on Gamasutra [0]. He has a weekly curated list of interesting articles he's read about video games. I rarely read all of them, but there's usually at least a few interesting ones in the lot.
if you're on HN you should probably just read all of Ian Bogost's articles in The Atlantic. I don't mean that to sound reductive; I'm an engineer by training working on a game design MFA now, his writing was some of the first material about games analysis that I found accessible. The Animal Crossing article of his I just linked is actually pretty boring for his work, but I imagine that The Atlantic specifically asked him for a piece about ACNH because it's such a cultural phenomenon right now. The stuff he says in that piece is the stuff academics have been saying about Animal Crossing games for a decade now. His pieces in The Atlantic are very accessible, and he comes from a technical background, so a lot of his work is written through the lens of procedurality (or
procedural rhetoric). I'm oversimplifying here, but procedurality is the study of how the rules of games create meaning. Since he's writing in The Atlantic, the stuff that's being published there is designed to be accessible to a non-academic audience. I really loved [Don't Play the Goose Game](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...), which is about Untitled Goose Game. The title is, of course, sarcastic clickbait that the author doesn't actually fully believe, but the content of the piece (which is about the relationship between labor and play) is very thoughtful. It also links to other pieces that you can read for some follow-on material. If you hate that piece, you might like Miguel Sicart's [Against Procedurality](http://gamestudies.org/1103/articles/sicart_ap), which is something of an academic diss-track against procedurality as a critical tool.
> regretfully academics try to optimize different metrics
um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
> insightful enough but not academic
based on what you asked for, Payne and Huntemann's [How to Play Video Games](https://nyupress.org/9781479802142/how-to-play-video-games/) might be up your alley. It's written specifically to bring the ideas of games academia to a non-academic audience.
edit: oh and to be clear, since you said "I have not read you": ummm if my first post made it seem like I'm Ian Bogost I should probably just clarify that I am not, in fact, Ian Bogost.
Regarding your edit, it was my typo. You write well, maybe you will be the next Bogost.
I read Bogost article (the Goose one) and I really liked it, that was the style I was looking for.I see he has published some books and many articles, so I will try to read more . Researching a little bit more about him, he has some weird positions, but classic for an academic (i.e "videogames cannot create good narrative") and so on.
> um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
My problem is not with academics per se, just with academic writings. When you write an academic article you are constrained to a set of implicit rules, things like clearly show your "contribution" to the field with the paper, quote lots of relevant literature, not ruffle the feathers of other academics, especially those with perceived power over you, try to sell up the cultural significance of your article and so on and so forth.
An example is better I suppose:
> Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1
by Debra Ramsay
Abstract
This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework that goes beyond the notion of hybridity (Giddings 2005, Keogh 2014) in addressing how videogames destabilise spatial and temporal relationships and facilitate play with the memory, history and cultural meanings associated with World War I. In contrast to the tendency in games studies to focus either on single-player or multiplayer, this article analyses form, content and player responses in both to answer the following questions:
What happens when the spaces and temporalities of two liminal phenomena merge in Battlefield 1? What affective intensities are generated in the play with cultural notions about WWI, and what emerges in the tensions between game form and historical content?
oh, yeah I get what you mean, I was thrown by the framing of metrics.
That abstract makes perfect sense in a very specific context, which is: it's using the language and tools established by prior fields of study as lenses through which the medium of video games can be analyzed. It's not written with the expectation that a reader understands the piece in isolation (or even that the reader understand the piece by reading it linearly), but is intended to be in dialog with other existing pieces of academic writing. That the opening seems to obtusely reference liminality without defining it seems like shoddy writing, but keep reading and liminality is defined ... four paragraphs later, for some reason. In a sense, you're supposed to just read it expecting to be confused and then bounce around. It's not literature. An analog in computing might be reading man pages or RFC's or whitepapers: stylistically obtuse at first, but each format starts to make sense once you've read a handful of them and have learned the language patterns and the most widely cited cross-references. Also a lot of it is just self-aggrandizing bullshit. (I enjoy this piece btw, and had not read it before.)
That's kinda why I like stuff like the Atlantic pieces; those pieces are written to stand up independently, and don't need the support of many prior writings to make sense.
In my last comment I was going to say something about foundational academic texts, namely Huizinga's "Homo Ludens", which the piece you just cited mentions almost right out the gate:
> There is a long history of association between war and play, as mapped out initially by Johan Huizinga, who argued that both share an essential identity in their earliest history: “Play is battle and battle is play” (89).
Homo Ludens is, to me, more accessible than a lot of other games writing because it's foundational, so it doesn't require a lot of prior knowledge to comprehend. The thing that's weird about games writing is that the prior knowledge cited by a lot of games writing is ... not about games; it's often writing from anthropology, or sociology, or critical film theory, etc.
My all-time favorite publication for intelligent games writing for a general audience was Kill Screen, but that project collapsed and is no longer in print. They have ebooks on Amazon still. I think my favorite single piece from them was an interview in issue 5 with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the designer of Rez and The Tetris Effect: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Screen-5-Sound-Issue-ebook/dp/B0...
that interview used to be available online as a pdf, but I can't find it any more.
he talks about celebrities as symbols and the evolution of celebrity as a concept and how it intersects with games. For me that was an incredibly mind-blowing piece. Nothing has ever come close to the quality of that publication. It struck the perfect level of sophistication and accessibility that has been completely unmatched since.
Not articles, but a favourite Youtube channel of mine is Game Maker’s Tookit. It does informative videos on various game-design topics, like story-telling through level design, how multi-player games get balanced, deep-dives into well-made levels from various games and what makes them so good, etc.
Here’s an example (and the channel’s most-viewed video) - How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves
That stuff is very in-the-weeds on the mechanics of platformers. If you like that video, Itay Keren's article on the history of how cameras work in 2d sidescroller games is one of my favorite pieces on 2d game construction: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Sc...
I agree. Also, there is a disproportionate amount of articles about esports.
The only article I found worthwile (very much so), was the one about Nintendo's history in Sweden/Europe. It's also about money/distribution but at least it's an interesting historic account of how Nintendo came to Europe in the early eighties through the lense of the distributor in Sweden with funny anecdotes.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/12/09/the-lie-that-helped-...
28 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.1 ms ] threadTheir PAX West/East reviews and thoughts are also excellent.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/war-stories-how-crash...
I must have read at least a couple hundred articles over the last year, and there's definitely a few that have stuck out to me. I compiled the ones I enjoyed the most (or wrote myself) and gathered them in this handy airtable.
Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter if you're so inclined to stay up to date on more content in the future: www.pausebutton.news
There is no introduction to tell me who is selecting these articles and why I should believe their claim that these are the best articles on this subject.
It’s displayed as a spreadsheet that’s far too big to fit on my screen even if I rotate the tablet horizontally; I have to scroll all the way to the right to read the brief summary of what each article is about.
And I cannot scroll vertically. At all. I drag the screen and it just tries to select the cells, or scrolls whichever column I’m pressing on left and right a little.
Seriously this is hilariously illegible and unusable on the iPad that I am looking at this with. Dump this into some other format that actually gets reflowed properly.
Presenting it as a single-page text structured as:
Article name
Article source, author
Article subject matter
would be much easier on the eyes. And they could put an ad way down below if they wanted to or on the side. (Or no ad at all.)
The first article starts out largely about Animal Crossing, and another Animal Crossing article appears on the list, but neither even attempt to interpret the game in any way, or to consider what the game might mean and how it relates to life as we know it. Compare with this recent Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/animal-cr... and you'll see what I mean. I find this incredibly ironic, because Animal Crossing is rich in content about labor, economics, and consumerism, but these themes are taken at face value and never critiqued in any meaningful way. While the author has cobbled together a list of articles about how games make money, the list is bereft of any interpretation of games in general, even the game about making money. Nothing in this list will improve the reader's literacy when it comes to interpreting and playing games.
A handful of the articles are just marketing about upcoming games. What makes this article on of the best articles about games? It is little more than an advertisement. https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/2/21155158/valorant-project-a...
To simply call these articles the "best gaming articles" is incredibly self-centered, as the viewpoints expressed in this list have an extremely narrow focus, and the focus is almost universally on money-making.
Do you have any examples or recommendations?
[0] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/SimonCarless/185740/
> regretfully academics try to optimize different metrics
um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
> insightful enough but not academic
based on what you asked for, Payne and Huntemann's [How to Play Video Games](https://nyupress.org/9781479802142/how-to-play-video-games/) might be up your alley. It's written specifically to bring the ideas of games academia to a non-academic audience.
edit: oh and to be clear, since you said "I have not read you": ummm if my first post made it seem like I'm Ian Bogost I should probably just clarify that I am not, in fact, Ian Bogost.
I read Bogost article (the Goose one) and I really liked it, that was the style I was looking for.I see he has published some books and many articles, so I will try to read more . Researching a little bit more about him, he has some weird positions, but classic for an academic (i.e "videogames cannot create good narrative") and so on.
> um I'm not sure what you're getting at here, that's not really my experience with games academia at all.
My problem is not with academics per se, just with academic writings. When you write an academic article you are constrained to a set of implicit rules, things like clearly show your "contribution" to the field with the paper, quote lots of relevant literature, not ruffle the feathers of other academics, especially those with perceived power over you, try to sell up the cultural significance of your article and so on and so forth.
An example is better I suppose:
> Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1 by Debra Ramsay Abstract This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework that goes beyond the notion of hybridity (Giddings 2005, Keogh 2014) in addressing how videogames destabilise spatial and temporal relationships and facilitate play with the memory, history and cultural meanings associated with World War I. In contrast to the tendency in games studies to focus either on single-player or multiplayer, this article analyses form, content and player responses in both to answer the following questions: What happens when the spaces and temporalities of two liminal phenomena merge in Battlefield 1? What affective intensities are generated in the play with cultural notions about WWI, and what emerges in the tensions between game form and historical content?
http://gamestudies.org/2001/articles/ramsay
That abstract makes perfect sense in a very specific context, which is: it's using the language and tools established by prior fields of study as lenses through which the medium of video games can be analyzed. It's not written with the expectation that a reader understands the piece in isolation (or even that the reader understand the piece by reading it linearly), but is intended to be in dialog with other existing pieces of academic writing. That the opening seems to obtusely reference liminality without defining it seems like shoddy writing, but keep reading and liminality is defined ... four paragraphs later, for some reason. In a sense, you're supposed to just read it expecting to be confused and then bounce around. It's not literature. An analog in computing might be reading man pages or RFC's or whitepapers: stylistically obtuse at first, but each format starts to make sense once you've read a handful of them and have learned the language patterns and the most widely cited cross-references. Also a lot of it is just self-aggrandizing bullshit. (I enjoy this piece btw, and had not read it before.)
That's kinda why I like stuff like the Atlantic pieces; those pieces are written to stand up independently, and don't need the support of many prior writings to make sense.
In my last comment I was going to say something about foundational academic texts, namely Huizinga's "Homo Ludens", which the piece you just cited mentions almost right out the gate:
> There is a long history of association between war and play, as mapped out initially by Johan Huizinga, who argued that both share an essential identity in their earliest history: “Play is battle and battle is play” (89).
Homo Ludens is, to me, more accessible than a lot of other games writing because it's foundational, so it doesn't require a lot of prior knowledge to comprehend. The thing that's weird about games writing is that the prior knowledge cited by a lot of games writing is ... not about games; it's often writing from anthropology, or sociology, or critical film theory, etc.
My all-time favorite publication for intelligent games writing for a general audience was Kill Screen, but that project collapsed and is no longer in print. They have ebooks on Amazon still. I think my favorite single piece from them was an interview in issue 5 with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the designer of Rez and The Tetris Effect: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Screen-5-Sound-Issue-ebook/dp/B0...
that interview used to be available online as a pdf, but I can't find it any more.
he talks about celebrities as symbols and the evolution of celebrity as a concept and how it intersects with games. For me that was an incredibly mind-blowing piece. Nothing has ever come close to the quality of that publication. It struck the perfect level of sophistication and accessibility that has been completely unmatched since.
Here’s an example (and the channel’s most-viewed video) - How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves
https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8
That stuff is very in-the-weeds on the mechanics of platformers. If you like that video, Itay Keren's article on the history of how cameras work in 2d sidescroller games is one of my favorite pieces on 2d game construction: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Sc...
- Errant Signal
- Game Maker's Toolkit
- hbomberguy
- Matthewmatosis
- New Frame Plus
- Noclip
- Super Bunnyhop
- Super Eyepatch Wolf
- ThorHighHeels
open to recommendations as well