Good morning, videogames. I fell hard for a new game on Friday night and I am eager to get back to playing it. Thankfully my links are already all picked out, neatly folded, and arranged in a row below. There are some good ones this week.

For Chisel, Mikhail Klimentov grapples with the thousands of hours he's spent playing Valorant, and paints an unflinchingly honest portrait that will be relatable to those who have ever obsessed over a multiplayer game.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the

Good morning, videogames. Last week's Lie-In was written in advance to cover for my absence, and frankly it was rude for people to continue publishing articles while I was away. Now this week's Lie-In needs to somehow contain almost two weeks of links to writing about videogames. Terrible for me; a bumper crop for you.

Aftermath launched Hater Week, a batch of articles in which they got a lot off their chests. I love this idea. Here's Gita Jackson on why survival games are annoying.

A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.

Speaking of haters, academic and translator Emily Wilson discussed her distaste for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. Wilson published a translation of the Odyssey in 2017 and knows her stuff, at

Good morning, videogames. I am still, somehow, on holiday, but once again I have prepared an article for you to read in advance. How have I collected a collection of articles worth reading this week when I haven't been at my desk? Well, no one ever said all the articles had to be new.

Many remember Kieron Gillen's New Games Journalism manifesto. No one remembers what I'd consider its sibling, written months earlier by then-PC Gamer editor Mark Donald. Donald had just redesigned the UK version of the magazine to focus more on games post-release and to support the kind of in-game cultural reporting Gillen later referenced, and he posted an open letter looking for contributions. It's more of a pragmatic appeal for pitches than Kieron's call to arms, but I think it's nevertheless an inspiring mission statement. It was what prompted me to pitch to PC Gamer the following year, after which Mark handed me my first paid commission and, a few months later, a full-time job.

I'm trying to create a magazine that communicates the incredible experiences gamers have. A magazine that reports on the amazing transformations