JcDent

Hello! This is a post to announce that Critical Distance is already compiling its annual This Year in Videogame Blogging roundup! We've decided, due to the shaky and fractured social media landscape we now inhabit, to push our usual call for submissions ahead by two weeks and give folks ample time to send in their favorite games criticism highlights from the past year. The deadline and methods of submission will still be the same as usual, but we'll get to all that at the end of the post. Here's what you need to know about submissions:

What Qualifies

• Games criticism, analysis, commentary, etc which was first published in some form in 2023.
• Works on videogames, computer games, interactive fiction, board games, tabletop, word games, card games, literally any kind of game.
• Written works.
• Audio works (must have transcript available).
• Video works (must have transcript available).
• Works not in English (must have an English-language summary available).
• Things we have previously featured on TWIVGB.
• Things we have not previously featured on TWIVGB.

What Does Not Qualify

• Works first published before 2023.
• Works that don’t have anything substantially to do with games.
• Works that are not web-hosted and open-access.
• Anything which violates our inclusivity statement.

Our Senior Curator and contributors all work diligently to collect and present the best writing about games each week, but that doesn't mean we catch everything! The state of social media is another complicating factor, as typical mainstays like Twitter and Facebook have gradually (or not-so-gradually) lost their utility when it comes to finding hidden or obscured gems, and newer sites may not yet have the discoverability tools or user base to compensate. That's where you come in! If you have a piece you think is a must-read, by all means send it our way!

To submit, simply shoot us an email, reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky or Mastodon (use the tag #TYIVGB if you want your submission to be considered), send us an ask on Cohost, or join our Discord server! The deadline for submissions is Midnight, Pacific Time, December 25th.

It's the post apocalypse, time to run around, shoot people, and... ride dinosaurs?

Too bad shipping is more expensive than getting the one on the left.

FM-100-2-1 is a an easy read

Then make tagging less chaotic. We're doing global feeds because there's no other unification, and a year of active community growth has not, and will not, solve that problem through healthy tagging culture. Under the current system, people will still be confused and left out when they're trying to opt in, and have no easy means of doing so.

There should be some kind of standardisation of tags for some things, because the current method of just hoping the community does it? Is not working, and has not stabilised into a healthy tagging culture at all, regardless of the global feeds. It's evident in any other attempt at a 'main tag', for which there are almost always half a dozen other tags that are trying to basically be the same tag.

Constantly having to put an unknown number of tags to try to cover one specific thing (a game, for instance) is preventing healthy tag culture I dare say MORE than the global feed is, and the feed only continues to be useful because it's one of the few tag types the community HAS standardised.

Hell, it's preventing the growth of healthy community cultures by way of keeping them obfuscated and fractured, with no indication of tag popularity other than the woefully uninformative tag suggestion box that appears.

If I want to tag a thing about Morrowind, what do I put? Morrowind? The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? TES3:MW? Any of the other possible variations? No one should have to write them all out in every case - that's just a bad system. It's not conducive to good community when you don't know how to even access that community, and woe be unto new users who have literally no way of figuring it out unless they fumble through the site for hours to try and glean what to do.

I don't know what the best way to do that is, but I do know that the global feed will not die by you trying to make it unpopular. It will die by better tagging systems so we're not constantly dividing and hiding topics by sub par tagging.

Insulting global tag users is just insulting people who want a better solution but literally cannot make one on their own, because they do not have the tools. And we don't do that shit here.

I wanted a general, extremely uncurated wall from the get go as a vehicle for finding new people, new subjects, and generally avoiding work.

I guess I'll have to go look into the arguments against global feed to understand what drives a view that's entirely opposite of mine.

If anything, I resent having to add global tags so that the stuff I write would be shared with more people.

Gah.