Interested in writing about games? Last week a bunch of game critics attended the first-ever Critical Proximity mini-conference in San Francisco. I gave a talk; my topic was "Writing games criticism for a mainstream audience." You can read a text version here.

The conference ran last Sunday, March 16, in San Francisco. It was in the same building as the Game Developers Conference, though it wasn't an official-official part of GDC. I wasn't able to see every talk, but some other cool talks from the second half include:

• This one by Darius Kazemi about why game critics should analyze source code.
• This one from Alan Williamson about making a video game print magazine.
• This one from Cara Ellison about her new project touring the world doing embedded journalism.
• This one from Raph Koster about music criticism and games w/r/t/ formalism.
• This one from Ian Bogost about what games criticism is even for.
• This one from Alex Lifschitz about why game critics should allow for their biases and call out the things they don't like in games. (With a pretty exciting finale!)

Really though, there were a lot that I didn't see, so go browse through 'em all using the arrows under each post and see what strikes your fancy.