[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including valorizing a frightening kind of warfare, designing games like a bastard, and more.] What the heck – you've waited enough. Let's get right to it with this week's best and brightest of the Ludodecahedron. It's time for This Week in Video Game Criticism! Tumblr-er Flutiebear starts us off with this excellent two-part series applying Victoria Lynn Schmidt's Heroine's Journey to Disney's Tangled and Bioware's Dragon Age 2. These analyses come highly recommended. From there, we pay a visit to GayGamer where newest writer EccentricTomboy writes on seeing sexism in competitive gaming from two sides:
"See, back before transition I would have been that guy: amused by the girl trying to play a man's game and trying to give her a good experience. It's the same reflex that prompts my friends to introduce me as a female gamer who is "actually really good at games," as if this is something that just isn't possible in our normal gaming life."
Meanwhile, The Mary Sue's Becky Chambers sits down with Rachel Weil, founder of FEMICOM, "a collection of twentieth century games for girls":
"[I]nstead of passing the site by, my eyes lingered over that tagline: The feminine computer museum. "All right, FEMICOM," I thought, clicking through the links. "Just how are you defining 'feminine'? Feminine according to who?" As it turns out, this is exactly the question that FEMICOM wants you to be asking. Failing to explore this site would have been a big mistake on my part. Not only did it lead to one of the most thought-provoking conversations I've had about gender roles in games, but it made me put my own gaming preferences under the microscope."
On the subject of curation, Venturebeat's Jeff DiOrio has a fantastic interview up with Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. Speaking of history, this week Split-Screen's Alan Williamson poked fun at developers' creating a false impression of it through those infamous "Game of the Year" repackagings. As Williamson observes, "Special editions aren't about specialty. They are mere upselling." Quality was also on the mind of Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs this week, as he reminds readers that all these successfully funded Kickstarter games are still hypothetical:
"What if the new Wasteland game is released and it's just kind of crappy? I feel like there is a lot of pressure on these first rounds of high-profile Kickstarted games to actually do well in release and in the public eye. It's great that there's been so much enthusiasm for giving money directly to creators of content, but now the onus is on them to deliver on some of these very big promises they've made. To be honest, I think the future of Kickstarter itself actually lies with them."
GUS MASTRAPA, whose name I occasionally write in all-caps just for emphasis, had two articles of note this week. First is his repost of his Kill Screen piece on games and heavy metal. Next, the latest in his Pretension +1 column for Unwinnable is a (rather charming and empathetic, in Mastrapa's usual fashion) reflection on how games will be the death of him:
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