This Week in Video Game Blogging: Overcoming toxic aspects of programmer culture

This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Zolani Stewart on topics ranging from Destiny flavor text to addressing toxicity in development spaces.

Aevee Bee wrote two stellar pieces of writing on Destiny this week, one of them is a series of mini-reviews on the game’s flavour text, the other a longer piece on what makes Destiny curious and interesting as a massive budget title.

Over at Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez does well articulating Fallout 4’s struggle between its role-playing roots and its streamlining towards action-game systems.

At Gamasutra, Richard Moss has a fascinating piece on Return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas Pope's follow-up to his IGF-winning Papers, Please, and the context of the 1-bit grayscale style it uses. And in the blogs section, Rich Geldreich writes an important piece on the toxic behaviours of programmer culture that reinforce the homogeneity of its communities.

Also at Not Your Mama's Gamer, Alisha Karabinus writes on Open World experiences and how they fit into a definition of play.

Stephen Beirne has a new Two Minute Crit up on his youtube, where he talks about the Crouch and Zoom mechanics of the Metal Gear Solid games.

Finally, Jake Tucker has an absorbing retelling of the development of the original Rainbow Six, and its impact on the military first person shooter.

That’s it for this now, friends. If you come across some work you’d like us to call attention to next week, don’t hesitate to give us a shout on Twitter or email.

If you like the work we do here, please consider contributing a monthly sum via either Patreon or Recurrency. If you can’t commit to a monthly sum but still want to help, we also accept one-time payments through Paypal.