This Week In Video Game Criticism: Holiday Links Special

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us a fresh roundup of holiday links compiled by Ben Abraham, spanning Shigeru Miyamoto through hating Steam during the holidays.] It’s the holiday season, and as such, I have a healthy dose of links for us to gorge on! No context for these ones, author and titles only – consider it an end-of-year clearing house post. We’ll be back full force in early January. Thanks to everyone for reading, and thanks to all the great bloggers and writers out there for providing us with such great material to link to. Here's what we've dug out for this week: - Rob Zacny for his personal blog – ‘Playing Optimally’. - The Escapist’s Extra Credits – ‘Narrative Mechanics’. - Evan Jones at Gamasutra blogs – ‘Breaking Down (the Idea of) the Locked Door’ - Gus Mastrapa at Joystick Division – ‘Gamers are Sheep’. - Jeff Jackson at GameLanguage – ‘Will Defending the Homefront Mean Being Anti-Asian?’ - Nick Dinicola at PopMatters – ‘Gaming and Politics’. - Troy Goodfellow at Flash of Steel – ‘The Chinese National Character’. - Steven O’Dell at Raptured Reality – ‘Talking About Minecraft #2: Narrative Implications’. - The Game Prodigy blogger – ‘Meet Facebook Games’ Ancestor: Coin-op arcades’. - Zach Alexander at Hailing From The Edge – ‘In Defence of Trolling’. - Angelo at Bergsonian Critique – ‘On Calling or Attempting to Understand Fear in Japanese Horror Games’. - Eric Swain at The Game Critique – ‘Indie Game Spotlight: One Chance’. - Dutch language game blog ‘Bashers.nl’ – ‘War has never seemed this real’. - Daniel Primed with Three – ‘God of War III – Kratos: Villain, Anti-Hero or Indifferent’, ‘God of War III – Graphical Attrition’ and ‘Diner Dash and Interactive Capitalism’. - Ben Abraham (hey, that’s me) on BenAbraham.net – ‘Rhetorical Questions’. - Adrian Forest at Three Parts Theory – ‘Rhetorical Answers’. - David Carlton at Malvasia Bianca – ‘Ben’s Rhetorical Questions’. - Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker – ‘Master of Play’. - John Brownlee at GearFuse – ‘Unevenly Distributed: Minecraft (or I have no mouth and I must build)’. - Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer – ‘The Action is in the Margins’. - Peter Shafer at Ruminatron5000 – ‘Is it wrong to hate Shadow of the Colosus’? - Benjamin Garratt at The Last Metaphor – ‘Compressed Space in Red Dead Redemption’. - Ferguson at Interactive Illuminatus – ‘Schell School’. - Ruffin at Curmudgeon Gamer – ‘Merry Xmas to me: How I learned to hate Steam’.