This week I played Warhammer 40K with my friends

This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Ben Abraham on topics including why Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is a feminist game of the year contendor, an apology for RPGs, and more.

"I'm sure Cliff Bleszinski and company would be the first to argue that Gears has nothing to do with September 11, and that's their right as creators. But it's our right as the audience to find our own meaning in the work. Ever since I first played Gears of War almost five years ago, it has struck me as a game that could not have existed without 9/11. Something like it, maybe, but not this game, with its unusual and potent mix of fear, uncertainty, and powerlessness."

"That's the balance to be struck with writing any sort of humor piece–what the hell is too high- or low-profile to be funny anymore? In a TWIVGB full of articles on post-9/11 war games and fetishization, the tone of the game Lockaby was writing about didn't even seem out of place. Maybe that's the full scope of the joke David's getting at: are we so jaded to turning anything–high art, low art, macabre, political, social, psychosexual–into a videogame that parodic descriptions of using a game stylus as a phallus to symbolically molest women seem a bit disgusting but at the end of the day, par for the course?"

"By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage. In sparing themselves the challenge of making their games deeper and more involving, they're the ones holding back the medium. While video games have come a long way since Mega Man, Battlefield 3's sanitized environment suggests that players are still limited to the same two basic actions: running around and shooting."

Portal 2 changes the tone of its central relationship by stripping some of that dignity away. Glados insults Chell constantly in ways intended to be understood as cattily "female": calling Chell overweight, insulting her appearance, and so on. She seems to believe that gendered insults will be the most effective against this mute, implacable enemy, and tries a variety of them. And even though these jokes are, cheap and awful, they're fantastic."