The 2024 Short List

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Winner:
Simone De Rochefort & Clayton Ashley
The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft takes the viewer “into the backrooms of espionage, where torture and death were a matter of bureaucracy.” You’ll be tempted, I think, to try to read something more in the smiles that form in the corners of some of the interviewees’ mouths. They have a spectacular story to tell, and they know it—but is there something else in that hint of a smirk? As with any good spy story, it makes you wonder, long after.
See: The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft

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Duncan Fyfe

A typical Fyfe piece must be, in the first place: an intricate and intentional bit of writing, packed with contrast and spectacle, spatially coherent and eminently readable, that teaches us while trying—and succeeding—to entertain. “Where the stories happen,” indeed.

See: The Simple Truth According to John Romero

The Long Way Home: Jordan Mechner’s Journey to the Past

Paying Respects to Press F

Alexis Ong

In Ong’s criticism, superficial glazes on a subject are advanced—only so that they can be immediately placed in check while Ong pursues the more complicated, genuine narratives that would never have presented themselves so readily.

See: 1000xResist Review

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Review

Grant Stoner

The two pieces below both forcefully evoke that particular kind of precarity, best embodied by the GoFundMe page, that is suffused throughout modern life but is most acutely felt in the disabled community.

See: A Prominent Accessibility Advocate Worked With Studios and Inspired Change. But She Never Actually Existed.

How Mass Layoffs Devastate Disabled Game Developers

Mason Andrew Hamberlin

I hate to cannibalize one of my own social media posts for this (terribly innutritious), but doesn’t criticism just hit another register when it’s arguing with others? To me, it practically sings. Especially in the hands of Hamberlin, who makes great hay out of the subject anthology, both when it’s right and (especially) when it’s wrong.

See: Even When You’re Not Playing, You’re Playing: On “Critical Hits”

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

What does it say about the world right now that an effort to make the fanatical Übermensch “Space Marine” more palatable involves having them use military lingo? Probably nothing good! But as Evans-Thrilwell deftly illustrates, fascism imbricates itself amid society somewhat less neatly—but no less effectively—than the Marines’ bulky plate.

See: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine