To all of our new readers: welcome! The past few weeks have been crazy.  We were linked on Rock Paper Shotgun, Critical Distance, Game Set Watch, and Gamasutra.  Laura and I both had pieces republished on Kotaku.  Our views per week have moved from the hundreds to the thousands.  And so, we wanted to take a moment to welcome all of you to the site and let you know what we’re about.

Laura and I are both Creative Writing majors at Dartmouth College.  We met in a course called Digital Game Studies, and after the course ended we both decided that we wanted to continue writing about games.  We’re interested in seeing games in new ways, in examining how we interact with games, and in exploring how games deal (or don’t deal) with important issues.  We think that games are more than just products, they’re experiences.

We try not to get too bogged down in academic stuff, but we don’t always succeed. We want our writing and ideas to be interesting, fresh and accessible.  Lots of games writing falls into the preview / review pattern, and this sucks because writers often stop talking about games just as soon as everyone else starts to play them.  We try to write the sort of stuff that will still be interesting in a few years, and we try to engage with old titles as well as new ones.

Several loyal readers grace these pages, and their comments are consistently insightful.  Please feel welcome to join the conversation!

We do our best to update with new content a few times a week, but unfortunately we’re currently wading into final exams, so don’t expect much for the next week or so.  When we emerge from the other side, though, you’ll hopefully have more to read than ever—the summer should afford us more time to play games and write about them.  We also have a podcast, but we haven’t updated it in a while.  We will remedy this soon!  Expect a new episode in about a week.

In the meantime, why not check out some of our older writing that you may not have read?  Laura’s Learning Dwarf Fortress is about navigating the ASCII graphics and online community of one of the world’s strangest and most awesome games.  I wrote a piece called Becoming Art about why we need more games like Demon’s Souls, and Laura wrote a response about why Max Payne is awesome anyways.  In Fable II I got a sex change, and it was strange.  Read about it in My Experiences as a Transsexual Lesbian in Albion (complete with video!).

We also want to say thank you.  Thanks for stopping by.  Thanks for the engaging discussions and the kind words.  We’re only getting started and we hope you’ll stick around.