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Have you ever wondered "where can I find good writing about videogames?"

Critical Distance is that starting place.

Our goal is to facilitate dialogue between developers, critics, educators and enthusiasts about critical issues in games culture. We are not a review scores aggregator or a buyer's guide, but a compendium of the best, most incisive, most thought-provoking discussion in and around games.

Your support helps us:

Practice public curation

A large chunk of the money we raise goes to pay the Senior Curator. Having the Senior Curator in place on an ongoing basis allows us to better serve readers, educators, and writers, by responding to questions and surfacing useful material from our archives, and ensuring that the site is updated regularly and maintained and developed sustainably.

Pay contributors

We rely on paid contributors to create a diverse range of content in different media, and we offer paid opportunities for writers to contribute on a one-off basis either by covering a weekly roundup or by submitting a critical compilation on a topic of their choice. Paying people for this work is vital in order to respect the labor that goes into creating it and to make it more possible for marginalized writers to get involved.

Archive writing that would otherwise be lost

We’re committed to fighting link rot and preserving the history of games criticism. Since mid-2016, Critical Distance has been automatically creating a back-up archive of every link that we include in any of our features. This means that when sites go down, we still have a snapshot saved for the benefit of readers, researchers, and game developers in the future. Sadly, not everything that we have linked to in the past has been saved in the Wayback Machine, so ongoing conservation efforts are vital if our curated collection will remain as helpful to people in the future as it is today.

Build new tools

Our new website design isn’t just a cosmetic change. With your support, we are creating new tools that make our archives more searchable, easier to browse, and more intuitive for first-time visitors. This allows us to make sure that we perform a quality public service, as custodians of a unique, free, educational resource.

Support developing writers

Giving people opportunities to be paid for their work at Critical Distance, preserving the legacy of games criticism, and having a Senior Curator available to respond to questions from people keen to learn more about what has been written on a topic in the past, all make Critical Distance an extraordinary resource for emerging writers. Our alumni have gone on to top roles at major outlets, and thanks to your funding we have been able to give expert assistance to people from many different professional fields.

We hope that you'll join us!