This Week in Video Game Blogging: Race, Representation and Learning from Board Games

Bad design isn’t always always without value. On the contrary, Mario Maker is an amazing tool. Much like listening to someone describe their dreams, the Mario Maker experience is a fragmented mess [...] So video game producers and art directors put them in their creations to draw on that shorthand.

The notion that design is intellectually relevant is uncontroversial. Nobody would ever seriously write off, for example, an Eames chair or a Gehry building; whether these objects fit some random definition of “art” is inconsequential to their perceived cultural value. But outside the industry, I don’t think that games are really understood as designed objects.

But more aggravating even than this are the forums, summits, breakout sessions and seminars on 'digital literature' run by exceedingly well-meaning arts people who can talk for hours about what the future might be for storytelling in this new technological age – whether we might produce hyperlinked or interactive or multi-stranded novels and poems -- without apparently noticing that video games exist. And they don’t just exist! They’re the most lucrative, fastest-growing medium of our age.

Then there are the people who say Her Story, Gone Home and so on aren't "games". We've got that with Craft Beer - eye-rolling at the fizzy upstart, tutting at the genre-stretching novelty of a Chocolate Aniseed IPA, and wincing as the high price of craft beer collides hard with the preconception of craft brewers as privileged hipsters. Conservatism is ugly, whatever the size of the C. Let's just all get drunk on whatever we enjoy and make out in the toilets.

On a personal level I look back at my huge contribution to the games that we’ve made and I have had to watch Dan get the credit time and time again. I’ve had journalists assuming I’m Dan’s PA, I have been referenced as “Dan Pinchbeck’s wife” in articles, publishers on first meeting have automatically assumed that my producer is my boss just because he’s a man, one magazine would only feature Dan as Studio Head and wouldn’t include me. When Dan has said “Jess is the brains of the operation” people have knowingly chuckled and cooed that it’s nice of a husband to be so kind about his wife. I don’t have enough paper to write down all of the indignities that I’ve faced.

Unlike almost every other storefront I have used thus far, Desura decided to completely anonymize customer data ... If I had access to those addresses, I could very easily migrate those customers over to Humble or itch.io and ensure that they retain access to their purchases and future updates. But I don't.