Tag: Critical Distance

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Actually, It’s About…2014

Released today was our annual end of year wrap-up podcast. This year I brought up regular Kris Ligman, semi-regular Alan Williamson and newbie to the podcast Lana Polansky. This year sucked. I think pretty much everyone can agree on that. However, because every year we all end up feeling miserable we decided to avoid directly talking about the biggest story of the year and in doing so found the year was a much nicer time that we had all forgotten. I like that year. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TYIVGB Methodology

We have posted our methodology on how I do the This Year In Video Game Blogging feature over at Critical Distance. The last few years I have always done a ‘how I did it’ post here and after the fact. Transparency has always been a bit of a problem for us. Not because we aren’t transparent, but because no one ever seems to pay attention when we’re announcing how we do things. The nadir of which was last year and that damn Kotaku commenter. In general, it has gotten better. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – A Critic By His Window

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first ever encounter with the wider world of video game criticism was through a post by L.B. Jefferies. That post led me to the Brainygamer, Mitch Krpata and the rest is history. In those early days, the scene was a small one. Small enough that ‘Mapping the Brainysphere‘ didn’t seem like an ironic or ludicrous title for a post. I didn’t quite realize it at the time of trying to reorient the CDC podcast along with the then new direction of the site what I was doing in my choice of guests. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – The Blogfather

Two years ago, I did a handful of interviews with critics that laid much of the foundation of what we consider modern independent video game criticism. They were intended to be the next few episode of the Critical Distance Confab. For various reasons they got back burned (mostly because I couldn’t stand listening to my own voice in editing) and we weren’t going to use them. Since then, I’ve moved my position to pure background technical monkey regarding the podcast. It’s for the best. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TWIVGB March 23rd and Critical Distance FAQ

With Kris spending the entire week at GDC, I stepped in to take the reins for this week’s Critical Distance roundup. As Critical Proximity was last week and Kris apparently has spent a good deal of time explaining Critical Distance to a bunch of new people, mostly middleware developers, I figured this would be a good time to go over much of the basics around Critical Distance as we still get asked much of this. | more

Eric Swain Game Issues

The Parable of The Runner

A few weeks back I was having a digital couch chat with Mark Filipowich. Eventually we got on to the topic of criticism preservation. We talk about how things are disappearing from the web and how depressing the 404s on the Old Games Writing Twitter account are. I begin to tell him a story. I was checking up on some old posts from 2009 or so about Mirror’s Edge. As I’m telling him this, I’m clicking through the saved URLs I have in a word document. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance End of Year Podcast 2013

And we finish the Critical Distance end of year stuff late this year with episode 14 of the CDC Podcast because I was lazy and there wasn’t anything about 2013 that seemed to inspire anybody. I had a lot less to edit and did a far more slapdash job of it this time and it is a much shorter show. And yet, it difficult to care about this particular year. As long as it was and I got complaints from both panel and listeners, at least 2012 was fun. The more I think about 2013 the less I think is worthy of remembrance. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TWIVGB January 12th

Yes, I did that last round up of the year and the first one of the next. Thanks to a scheduling snafu I volunteered to do it at the last minute. Which contributed to its lateness. I had to plow through 2-3 weeks' worth of suggestions, a lot of which I hadn’t read. I was behind on my reading as it was time of decompression after TYIVGB for me. As is often the case for us who have done this for a long time we play with how the round up comes out. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

TYIVGB 2013: An Examination of Methodology and the Nature of Curation

This is the fourth annual This Year In Video Game Blogging and I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of such an endeavor. I have a few things to say about this end of year roundup and a few things about Critical Distance as a whole. They are divided into sections. Normally, I wouldn’t go to such extreme and just do a quick linking post with an interesting anecdote or two about its creation, but I feel there is more that needs to be said. | more