Good morning, videogames. I have a question. Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work? Such that you can say: that guy "hates this type of stuff", that gal "loves this type of stuff"? Maybe that "stuff" is a whole genre, or just a mode of play, a style, a trope, a design choice, anything at all, but whatever it is, it's a defining aspect of that critic's work. Alright? Alright. Now here are some articles worth reading from across the past week.

Japanese game studios have been relatively shielded from the choppy seas of the recent games industry. For This Week In Videogames, Francisco Dominguez tried to find out why.

From the outside looking in, it's a harsh indictment of Western studio culture. Due to Japan's strong labour protections that severely restrict the use of layoffs, reckless cycles of overhiring followed by layoffs never became a regular occurrence domestically. Prominent

Good morning, videogames. Some weeks, no great writing about gaming comes to me organically and I need to make a special effort to go looking for it. I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you this week in reading and rejecting several dreadful reviews, previews and features to find even a handful I could bring myself to share. Thankfully, once the games are out of the way, I get to link to a great and somewhat horny article by a nonagenarian.

One of the pumping limpets clinging to the walls of bilge-filled cultural adulterant PC Gamer With Airs wrote a review of Roman Sands RE:Build that is worth putting your waders on for.

Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in

Good morning, videogames. I normally write this article on a Saturday night after my kid has gone to bed, but he was at a sleepover at a friend's house yesterday. This slight change in routine was enough to completely throw me off. I spent the night playing games and only remembered The Lie-In when I went to bed at 2am. Consider this tardy issue of The Lie-In as bleary-eyed and emotionally fragile as my 10-year-old normally is after staying up all night with four friends, yet still full of links worth reading.

There are a million little ways in which the social contract is eroded by social media mega-sites. Laura Michet writes about "self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth"; how a failure to signal that you've learned the rules, or that you know there are rules to learn, makes it harder to extend trust and respect.

In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with,