Our Favourite Gaming Reads

It’s been a long time since we’ve pointed you to some of our favourite gaming reads on the internet, and there are so many deserving sites.

Here’s a quick look at 200of the sites we think are the bee’s knees and worth your time and eyeballs. We contacted each site and asked their grandhooha to write up a little something about what makes each site special. I’ve included that below, in the order received.

We’ll be updating this blog roll on a semi regular basis, but in the meantime drop in your favourite gaming blog reads in the comments. Enjoy!

The Blog Roll

The Cross and the Controller
The Cross and the Controller is a site dedicated to looking at video games from a theological perspective. Founded and run by theologians and seminarians, we attempt to take a look both at individual games as well as gaming as a whole through a theological lens, and ask what games and game culture can say about God and Humanity. TC & TC has two main goals. First we want to apply the critical tools of systematic theology to video games and gaming culture. Second, we want to help develop new philosophical tools and language to talk about ultimate realities through the medium of video games.

Sexy Videogameland
Sexy Videogameland is the blog of Leigh Alexander, news director at Gamasutra, Kotaku columnist and writer on social media and culture. At her informal ‘home’ online, she writes personal thoughts and trend pieces on the culture of interactive entertainment.

UK Resistance
Started out as a site about how amazing the, er, Sega Saturn was, then lost interest and motivation at the same rate Sega lost market share and respect. Is now mostly about trying to find interesting things that haven’t already been on bloody Kotaku three weeks ago.

MTV Multiplayer
MTV Multiplayer attempts to give its readers a bluntly honest understanding of the games they play and of the people who make those games. It is managed by Russ Frushtick, senior writer for MTV News.

Rock, Paper Shotgun
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is the PC gaming site. Founded, owned, and staffed by a hirsute squad of industry veterans, it’s the site that the most enthusiasm for the weird and wonderful variety of the PC platform.

Cheap Ass Gamer
Cheap arse Gamer highlights the latest information on video game sales and deals, and features price search functionality that includes the latest new and used prices (and trade-in values too). Email alerts can be set to notify a shopper when a game hits the desired price. CAG also offers a free peer-to-peer game trading marketplace, which integrates easily with a user’s collection and wish list, matching up potential traders automatically.

Brainy Gamer
Brainy Gamer is a blog and podcast devoted to thoughtful conversation about video games. Launched in 2007, the site features analysis and criticism by Michael Abbott with regular feedback from a loyal community of readers including developers, academics, enthusiasts and fellow critics. Abbott teaches theatre, film, and new media at Wabash College.

Blue’s News
Blue’s News is one of the internet’s original gaming news websites, reporting the latest on PC games since 1995. In addition, Blue’s also offers overviews of console and mobile gaming, as well as general news about technology and the internet.

Wonderland
Wonderland is the personal site of Alice Taylor, games enthusiast, entrepreneur and ex-games publisher within the UK’s BBC and Channel 4. Once long ago a long-term hardcore Quake player, Alice is usually in front of her DSi or XBox Elite these days, with a preference toward Valve games and any handheld strategy RPGs. Lapsed endgame Horde too in World of Warcraft, she’s looking forward to The Old Republic, and all the inevitably fabulous associated crafts that’ll turn up on Etsy. Her areas of interest: indie games, educational play, MMOs, zombies, crafting, gaming obsessions, the evolution of television and socially networked play.

Gamasutra
Gamasutra has been covering ‘the art and science of games’ since 1996, featuring the latest news and analysis about the game industry from an insider perspective – as well as opinion pieces, analysis, and game postmortems by industry professionals, a user-contributed blogs section, and the game biz’s leading video game job site.

Kill Screen
Kill Screen is a videogame arts and culture company that runs a website, produces a magazine, runs a online store, and does a bunch of other things that we’d love to tell you about in person. We’re interested in this big question of what do videogames mean for those who make them and those who play them. Kill Screen is interested in the intersection between videogames and every other domain of creativity from art to music to design. So far, we’ve graced the pages of Wired, NY Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Observer and more.

Destructoid
Destructoid is the Webby-nominated news and reviews web site that operates like a social video game club. The site was created to sneak its founding members into a press-only convention, then famously promoted in a home-made robot helmet. We publish hundreds of articles a day from our global editorial team and community members alike, and reach over two million readers a month.

The Escapist
The Escapist is a multiple Webby Award-winning internet media publication focusing on games and entertainment. Anchored by the weekly The Escapist Magazine publication, the site’s offerings are rounded out by a host of thoughtful editorial content contributed by some of the most notable writers and thinkers in interactive entertainment, engaging social media elements such as the annual game developer showdown “March Mayhem,” timely and relevant news and reviews, a vibrant and dedicated community, and a variety of innovative WebTV video series including the critically-acclaimed “Zero Punctuation.”

Paste Magazine
Paste Magazine might be best known as an indie music mag, but they have covered games for as long as they have covered music or film. With a list of contributors that includes many of the best and brightest writers in the international gaming press, Paste offers indie-centric coverage, hard-edged reviews, provocative editorial and conversational critique of videogames and the people who make them.

Quarter to Three
Quarter to Three has been around for over 10 years as a community of adult gamers (not that kind!). The site is run by long-time games writer Tom Chick, who regularly updates the front page with news tidbits, reviews, and game diaries, some of which are contributed by the community. The overarching idea of the site is that it’s about the experience of playing games, and not the industry of making games. “By gamers, for gamers” instead of “by games journalists, for gamers”, if you will. Quarter to Three also hosts a couple of podcasts, including a videogaming podcast that’s, well, not what you’d expect from a videogaming podcast.

The Artful Gamer
The Artful Gamer began as a place to think out loud about the connections between gaming and psychology, and over time has become an ongoing attempt to work out the meaningful roles that gaming plays in our lives. If gaming can (at times) be more than ‘mere entertainment’, then most of the site is dedicated to articulating those deeply personal, poetic and lyrical moments that transform us as gamers.

Techland
Techland is Time Magazine’s digital destination for everyone passionate about the ways technology moves through our lives. The site’s contributors give readers fresh, funny angles on everything from gadget reviews to news on cutting edge innovations. Spearheaded by Evan Narcisse, Techland’s video game coverage offers in-depth reviews, interviews and opinion that provides insight on the trends, developers and titles that make interactive entertainment such a dynamic landscape.

Action Button
Action Button Dot Net is a sporadically updated blog focused on usually quite lengthy reviews of whatever videogames the writers actually find the time to play. Many reviews are submitted by anonymous sources and group-edited by Action Button’s crack team of writers – and many of us are game developers ourselves. Action Button’s schtick is that we review videogames as entertainment, not as videogames. This means that, unlike the majority of gamer-centric websites, you might see more plain-speaking breakdown of game mechanics and principles. We have a reputation for being unduly “harsh”. This is probably because, on our four-star rating scale, one star is “average”. It’s true: we are mean and our opinions often differ greatly from the mainstream, though it has nothing to do with us actually being jerkoffs: much of the time, we’re being hard on games because we love them and want to see them do better. That’s why we wrote The Action Button Dot Net Manifesto — a list of the best games of all-time. (Spoiler: we call Out of This World the best game of all-time. Also, we love Secret of Evermore and Spartan: Total Warrior.) Apparently, students in a film criticism class at some Ivy League school we won’t name are forced to read I wrote that”, and the guy punches me in the neck (or opens his wallet and tries to give me his debit card and PIN). The “editorial staff” is less a group of writers and more a group of word-lifting bodybuilders trying harder and harder to one-up the last guy’s metaphor (no one can beat my God Hand review). Also, I wrote an 18,000-word review of Final Fantasy XIII, and 183 people like that review on Facebook. Also, after writing that review of Final Fantasy XIII, I shattered the internet’s impression of me by rewriting it in 1,500 words in six minutes. In conclusion, I am cool, we at Action Button Dot Net are cool, and you will be cool if you read our website — which just launched a brand-new redesigned layout this week.

In-Game
In-Game is Msnbc’s blog dedicated to covering video games and the role they play in our daily lives. Whether you play games on a home console, PC, phone or Facebook, In-Game offers game reviews, news and commentary about all kinds games of for all kinds of players.

Joystiq
When you read Joystiq, here’s what you’ll be pointing your eyeballs at: the latest video game news and commentary, game videos and screenshots, reviews and previews – all presented with as much excitement, enthusiasm, insight and fun as the laws of physics allow. But don’t think that lighthearted jabs and an irreverent tone signals the end of serious business: Joystiq strives to maintain accuracy, to dig deeper, to do away with meaningless PR prattle, to gracefully decline luxury popcorn machines (like in the movie theater!), and to ask the awkward questions.

Collision Detection
Collision Detection is a blog by Clive Thompson, a journalist who writes about science, technology and games for Wired magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Other keywords: Ludology theory, bot-generated poetry, giant squid, science-confirms-the-obvious.


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At Kotaku, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

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