Interested in writing about games? Last week a bunch of game critics attended the first-ever Critical Proximity mini-conference in San Francisco. I gave a talk; my topic was “Writing games criticism for a mainstream audience.” You can read a text version here.

The conference ran last Sunday, March 16, in San Francisco. It was in the same building as the Game Developers Conference, though it wasn’t an official-official part of GDC. I wasn’t able to see every talk, but some other cool talks from the second half include:

This one by Darius Kazemi about why game critics should analyze source code.

This one from Alan Williamson about making a video game print magazine.

This one from Cara Ellison about her new project touring the world doing embedded journalism.

This one from Raph Koster about music criticism and games w/r/t/ formalism.

This one from Ian Bogost about what games criticism is even for.

This one from Alex Lifschitz about why game critics should allow for their biases and call out the things they don’t like in games. (With a pretty exciting finale!)

Really though, there were a lot that I didn’t see, so go browse through ’em all using the arrows under each post and see what strikes your fancy.