Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I felt as though 2010 was a pretty OK year for this site. Below, I'm going to be listing two of the "best" articles per month of this site's year of existence. If you're looking for the approach to gaming philosophy for this site, this would be the best place to start.

JANUARY

The Problem of Interactivity – why what we do rarely matters.

We kept killing you and teabagging you – on the lack of LGBTQ protagonists (by default) in video games

FEBRUARY

Treatments of race and colonialism in Avatar and Little King's Story – Cing's Pikmin/Harvest Moon mashup is still one of the most relevant, hard-hitting, and amazing games ever made.

Defence Squad: Wii Music – unfairly treated from the get-go, Wii Music taps into that primordial need to create in a more convincing fashion than almost any other game I've seen.

MARCH

Five things games could learn from Miyazaki movies – though, if we're being honest, it's probably a lot more than just five things.

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon – a game that crystallizes so much of the theory present on this website, even if it flouts the conventional definition of "fun"

APRIL

Why Roger Ebert was right; Why Roger Ebert was wrong – John and I FOUGHT WITH WORDS over this.

Ecology in gaming – a subject I'd like to return to, but here's my gestating thoughts from a few months ago.

MAY

Attaching to videogames – Stephen gives probably the best argument I've heard about why "morality systems" in gaming are completely broken.

Every Mario game ever – Mario is still probably the leader in terms of game design acumen and mysterious, player-centric themes and empowerment, and every game in the main series so far has just been completely wondrous.

JUNE

Final Fantasy XIII review – though I feel in the back of my head that I might have been too harsh (but really, I wasn't), what's most interesting to me is that FFXIII is just most HD games, filtered through a Japanese sensibility and with its linearity more forefronted.

Armed conflict – a video game is going to have to do something REALLY special if it wants to impress me and have gunplay as its main mechanic.
 

JULY

Nightmares and Daydreams – video games are a constant nightmare state.

Challenging games – gamers want to be challenged. Not in terms of difficulty but in terms of subject matter (and also difficulty, a little bit).

AUGUST

Dragon Quest IX review – probably one of the most narratively daring games of the year.

Red Dead Redemption review – you're a god on a horse.

SEPTEMBER

Every Metroid game ever – though there have been one or two missteps, on the whole, Metroid is the most compelling case for isolation in gaming.

The Vigigames Manifesto – besides the other articles listed here that give our (or my) views on gaming, this condenses it all into one place.

OCTOBER

Bit.Trip Fate review – like Fragile Dreams, this is a game series that really understands how to make a videogame actually mean something without beating you over the head and saying THIS MEANS SOMETHING…

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West – … which is something that this game does not do, at all.

NOVEMBER

Ambition and execution – are they mutually exclusive? (Also, read the Fallout: New Vegas review for more on this BREAKING STORY)

Call of Duty: Black Ops – beyond the awful marketing and the millions upon millions of dollars thrown at this franchise, CODBLOPS represents everything wrong with the gaming community.

DECEMBER

Getting beyond fun – games are supposedly supposed to be "emotional" experiences. So why is it that the catharsis that games promise always has to be tied to "fun"?

The new curriculum – I'm a teacher and this is basically my passion project. Hopefully one day I'll be able to see it actually happen.

 

Here's hoping 2011 will be an OK year!

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