Last Friday, as Joe Koller was streaming Invisible, Inc for our 2016 fundraiser, he described using our archives to learn about interesting observations that had been made about the game. Despite the fact that Invisible, Inc is a relatively niche title that has not received a great deal of critical attention, he was able to find an article by Robert Yang that explored the game’s design in ways that he hadn’t previously considered.

Thanks to our archives, that article didn’t get lost in the tangled mass of reviews, previews and player guides that you find when using a regular search engine: our hands-on curatorial process makes valuable critical insights surfaceable for years to come.

In this testimonial, Brendan Vance talks from the writer’s perspective about our value as a place that spotlights these unique insights on games. Providing the largest and oldest curated archive of games criticism allows us to not only serve readers with the material that is most likely to expand their perspective, but also to help writers to have their work read by curious readers.

Brendan Vance, Games Critic and Developer

Whenever I find a subject I really care about, I need to treat it with due respect. For me this means spending a whole lot of time thinking about it and writing many thousands of words concerning it. I love working in a considered and expansive way, and I also love reading this kind of work. Yet once I’ve finished my 10,000 word essay concerning a videogame from three years ago, and the only site willing to publish it was my own personal blog, it’s awfully difficult to get my stuff in front of anyone. That’s where Critical Distance comes in. Critical Distance is about the only place on the internet where you can discover writing like mine. It’s not concerned with maximizing click counts, or keeping up with the most bankable trends. It simply aims to show you good work, in whatever form it takes, at whatever moment it appears. In this way it is utterly unique.

To keep doing this work, and to expand into more media and more languages, we need your help. Please spread the word about our fundraiser and tell somebody today why Critical Distance is important for the future of games and online writing.