Graham Smith

Good morning, videogames. As I write this, on Saturday evening, my son has just fallen asleep as I read him the closing chapters of The Hobbit. I don't take this personally. It's the first time either of us has read the book, and I think he's enjoying it, but there is perhaps nothing greater than lulling your child to sleep with a story. As you read this roundup of some good writing about videogames on Sunday morning, may you also drift off for another peaceful slumber.

Aftermath have been publishing up a storm with the delightfully named Woke Week, a "week of stories celebrating Woke 2". There were more interesting articles than I've yet had time to read, so I'm going to pick three. You should start with Gita Jackson's take on what Woke 2 means to her.

In this first version of wokeness, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical of figureheads and corporations co-signing social movements as I needed to be. I had this unshakeable belief that justice would emerge in the end, that people would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. I trusted companies, I put my faith in people who

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world factory armed

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into