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I’m not terribly happy to be feeling the need to write this.

Last year was good for me, writing-wise. I put out a lot of articles of a sufficiently high standard on whatever topics I felt compelling. It was creatively fulfilling. I also continued to find and refine my voice as a critic, to practise my ghost and hone it into a more distinct shape with each passing month.

It was—it is—an on-going learning process.

Part of that involved routinely scouring my feelings to find a way to articulate what it is my beliefs are on the medium of games, or on the narrative of a particular game, or on the discourse surrounding one or the other. Especially when I find my ghost at odds with how other people say we experience this or that, or how this or that exists in the world or ought to exist.

This led, at some point, to my use of the term “ludo-fundamentalism” on a couple of occasions to describe things I felt about how mechanics are often considered and weighted. I am not the first person to have felt and expressed these things, and I wasn’t the only person whose writing drifted towards incorporating these criticisms into our on-going analyses of games. Continue reading →