Friday, January 15, 2016


News & Views
1/9/16-1/15/16
Welcome everyone to a much more normal News & Views! It’s been a busy first full week back in lab, but The Impact Factor never skips a beat! Really looking forward to relaxing some this weekend, though.

News & Views is always here to bring you the best video game writing, stories, editorials & opinions from around the web. This week, I found great pieces about drug use in eSports, how a dating app is like Warcraft, why Life is Strange passes the Spielberg test of games as art, and how H.G. Wells was one of the impactful pioneers of tabletop gaming. Enjoy!

And of course you can check out the brand new episode of The Impact Factor podcast that was posted today! You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or if you prefer other methods, check out our SoundCloud. We’re on YouTube too!

Spotlight
Patrick House, The New Yorker

Worth Reading
Core-A-Gaming, YouTube

Christopher Byrd, The Washington Post

Chris Pruett, Gamasutra

Ben Kuchera, Polygon

Michelle Ehrhardt, Kill Screen

With Comments
Zach Gage, Gamasutra
What an awesome look into the analytical mind of a game designer. So many games use, and rely upon, dice rolls (hidden from the player or not). Gage runs through the evolution of the dice-rolling system in Tharsis and it’s fascinating. One of the key points here is the balance of dice rolls leading choices or making a choice and then relying upon dice to see if you can accomplish your goal. It’s the difference between craps and King of Tokyo. Very interesting and well worth a watch if you have any interest in board games, video games, randomness, or game design.

Sidney Fussell, Offworld
Fussell continues to write extraordinary pieces for Offworld. Here, Fussell ponders what games can do to better represent black women. The depiction of black women often focuses on strength, but in the process loses ‘personhood.’ It would be great to see more characters that are funny or quirky or dark, and less one-note.

Brian Taylor, Paste
Well, if you needed any more reason to like (or at the very least appreciate) H.G. Wells, here it is. Taylor details how Wells championed a tactical tabletop game titled Little Wars, and the evolution of that idea into the modern board game, especially those that are miniature-based. Very cool.

Gamesradar Staff, Gamesradar
I’m a big fan of ranked lists. For example, you can check out a list of my #12-7 and #6-1 top games of 2015. Or my ranking of the Souls games. I can’t say this Final Fantasy list is 100% accurate (since I haven’t played them all), but I mostly agree with their ordering. Final Fantasy 6 is the best. Period.

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