If most videogames are collaborative stories that the player travels through and participates in, like an actor following their part of the script, Elden Ring is more like a complex puzzle box that players collectively poke at, trying to find a way into to figure out its secrets. It pretends to be about masochistic individual performance but is in fact about collaboration, helping each other out, and working against a deliberately obtuse and unfair opponent.

If we properly situate The Last of Us: Part II in the broader medium of videogames, and not just the subfield of Triple-A action videogames, both its accomplishments and failings are better tempered and it is easier to evaluate it for what it actually is.

For journalists and critics, for cultural institutions, and for players generally, Untitled Goose Game’s visibility and mainstream success is an opportunity to develop a new language and understanding of this broader field of videogame creation that does not fit neatly within traditional understandings of ‘the videogame industry’.

The right has successfully spread a perception of the university under neoliberalism as that of a vending machine: as transactional environments where you put X dollars in and get something directly worth X dollars out the other side. Students become customers. Researchers becoming entrepreneurial inventors bidding for venture capital.

Last week, videogame studio ArenaNet fired two of its employees. After a mild Twitter altercation in which narrative designer Jessica Price called out someone for mansplaining her job back to her, a hateful mob of misogynistic gamers mobilised to complain about her ‘abusive’ behaviour.

The Australian game industry’s reaction to the government response has been primarily one of frustration. While many senate inquiries receive no response at all, and the Abbott and Turnbull governments have never shown interest in supporting Australian videogame developers, the response nevertheless disappointed a burgeoning industry that has long struggled for recognition.

By incorporating public spaces, Pokémon Go can’t help but to incorporate the politics of those public spaces that make urban movement much easier for some people than for others.

Archiving and sustaining history is an impossible challenge for every art form. Old paintings fade, books go mouldy, original copies of films are lost in warehouse fires. The perceived immateriality of digital forms such as videogames is often seen as a miracle solution, not susceptible to the degradation of mere material artefacts. But the truth is far more dire: digital artefacts are no less dependent on their material grounding than non-digital artefacts.

In tracing this early history, it is important to acknowledge the women who were present throughout, such as the human computers of the 1940s, or Ada Lovelace (responsible for significant early contributions to the understanding of computer programming), or Veronika Megler (who co-created the critically acclaimed 1982 video game The Hobbit). But the existence of these women does not render the field less patriarchal – that is, open to men and often closed to women.

It’s been a time defined by vitriolic and misogynistic attacks on women who dare to make or critique videogames and birther-movement-level conspiracy theories about the corruption supposedly at the core of videogames journalism.

My introduction to Kim Kardashian: Hollywood was through an overheard conversation. Two friends who would be the first to tell you that they are not in any way ‘gamers’ were discussing their custom-made celebrity avatars. They were sharing networking and dating tips, and reminiscing about some of the game’s sharper jokes.

When Id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992, it birthed video games’ most paradoxical genre: the first-person shooter.

Dear Susan When I first read your essays in 2012, I became so excited. There, in pieces written half a world away, half a century ago, were the same challenges that a new wave of critics are facing today. Like you, these critics are carving out new discourses and vocabularies around an oft-sidelined cultural form. I am talking about the new video game critics, those predominately young writers who are analysing video games as cultural and creative works.

2013 was not the greatest year for high budget, ‘Triple-A’ games. Many of the year’s biggest releases felt tied down by their own ‘gameiness’. That is, there were plenty of big games aiming to do something intelligent, but which also felt the pressure to include arbitrary challenges simply for the sake of including them.

In video games, size matters. As a creative medium driven by tech industry futurism, where ‘innovation’ means incremental alterations of the same, known franchises, a ‘good’ game is a bigger and better version of a previous game.