[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including what gamers stand to lose if SOPA passes, considerations on gender, and more.] The big newsworthy moment of the week deserves some equally worthy coverage. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has raised some legitimate hackles across the web, including gaming communities. Kirk Hamilton has arranged your one-stop primer, including reference to our own Ian Miles Cheong's call to action on Gameranx. But why should you care?
Arguably, the law would be fine if rightsholders didn't abuse it, but as we've seen, rightsholders are more than capable of abuse even with existing laws. [...] As a gamer, here's what you stand to lose if SOPA passes:
Mods
"Let's Play" videos
Video replays
Video reviews and commentary
Unofficial game guides
The taking, hosting, and sharing of screenshots, artistic or otherwise
Image forums (Reddit, 4chan)
If even the articles above are too dense for you, don't worry. John Bain has a video version. I would encourage readers to take these articles to heart as they read the rest of this roundup, particularly how so much of the articles featured here depend on the legal gray areas SOPA would snuff out. Moving forward, let's set the tone for this week's blog offerings. Taking a long view, Voorface argues that gamers need to study up on their art history, saying that Capital-A Art is a relatively recent construction:
"Videogames do offer a challenge to traditional ideas of the value of Art and of the Work of Art, but this is only because the foundations of those concepts are so flimsy that they are challenged by their own shadow. For a while now it's been understood that trying to make videogames conform to our understanding of other media – film especially – is foolhardy. Instead of trying to paste past aesthetic models onto videogames we should try to understand videogames as a separate medium."
The past week also provided fertile ground once again on considerations of gender both in gamic representation and among gamer communities. We begin with Mark Sorrell, who (perhaps enigmatically) declares "I am bellowing":
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