This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Joe Köller on topics ranging from gamer demographics to fan-made patches.
According to a recent Pew study, nearly half of all American adults play videogames, but only 10 percent consider themselves gamers. Adrienne Shaw expands on the topic by talking about other research, possible explanations, and how gender factors into it all.
Some people suggest that we need everyone who plays games to identify as a gamer. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I do think it is important that anyone who does feel an investment in that label to feel the right to adopt it [...]. But I also think that it is just as important and politically necessary to suggest that you don’t have to be a gamer to care about games.
In other news, Twitter hired a "Director of Gaming Partnerships" this week. Nobody is quite sure what that means, but Maddy Myers provides us with some entertaining speculation.
On Gamasutra, Brandon Sheffield brings us the most surprising 90s games, a list chock-full of doozies. While we're on memory lane, John Romero recently provided us with this video showing the demo for a PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 that never came to be.
On Femhype, we have this interview with game designer Rachel Pope led by Miss N, and this article about fan-made patches queering up Harvest Moon by Pluto.
In the meantime, Eurogamer provides us with both an exhaustive history of the Kinect by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, and Keith Stuart's look at game violence in the context of crime fiction.
That's about it for this week, thank you so much for tuning in! Next week we are going to send off the old year with This Year In Videogame Blogging, and it's not too late for you to submit articles for our consideration. Just email them to us, same as you would any other week, and use This Year in Videogame Blogging as the subject line.
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