Friday afternoon tidbits

Christmas is just one week away, which probably means this will be the last Friday links post of 2009. Better make it a good one!

-All 12 parts of Slate's Gaming Club are up now. At over 1,000 words a piece, that's a lot of debating. I hope it was worth people's while to read. I had a great time writing it, and interacting with Chris, Jamin, and Leigh. The blogosphere is a conversation in some ways, but it's so indirect that it can still feel like you're just talking to yourself. I always enjoy a chance to do something like this. I also want to mention the editor of the piece, Josh Levin, who worked as hard as any of us and did a great job putting it all together.

-In a decade-in-review piece, the Phoenix's Ryan Stewart says that now that games have reached critical mass, it's time for some anti-establishment developers to rise up. He says gaming needs its "Nirvana moment," a phrase he tried to resist using but which sums it up too well not to. As is often the case when people say "Why don't we have x, y, or z," I'll say that they are out there somewhere, but he's right that popular games are still sort of in a hair-metal phase.

-Tom Armitage has some ideas to fix "No Russian." I think they're really smart, and would have gone a long way toward alleviating some of the problems I had with it. Still, though, the biggest issue is the tonal clash with the rest of the game, and that wouldn't be solved unless they changed everything else.

-Thanks to my new Kotaku features feed (thanks, Sal Paradise), I didn't miss Leigh Alexander's piece about developers getting appropriate credit for games. This is an issue that goes back to the very beginning. It's why Activision started in the first place. Things are better now than they were then, sure, but it's nuts that you have to basically be enslaved for the duration of a development cycle if you want to get credit for your work.

That's all I've got for this week. Have a great weekend!