Defining Digital Humanities (if you’re well versed in digital humanities, you can skip this. I’m not trying to provide anything new, just trying to bring others up to speed.) Depending on where you’re perched on the academic landscape, you may have a very different definition of digital humanities. At a […]
alexlayne
211 posts
As it sometimes happens, I was getting a little writers block trying to come up with my post for this week. I have only really been playing XCOM and Don’t Starve. Most of my time has been spent doing meat space things this last week. Besides the annoyance of learning […]
Open Scene: It’s October 8, 1962. You’re overhearing a top-secret conversation among America’s top military, FBI, and CIA officials who are all anxiously awaiting the arrival of a “case.” Switch to a disgruntled CIA agent with a bottle of booze, listlessly listening to music in a hotel room. Someone comes […]
There was a thoughtful response to my last post, Female Game Protagonists: Engendering Power Through Assemblages. I wanted to respond in the comment section, but it got a little out of control and just became another post. If you missed the last post, it was about using the idea of […]
Ok, so this blog starts to get a little fancy-pantsy (AKA: academicy). So bear with me. So what does it mean to be an assemblage? As many of you may know, assemblages as a term is popular in OOO and in Latour’s writing. But you also may know, I have […]
(This is the first in a series of posts I am doing working with the theories of scholar and author Katie King. These are going to be a lead up to a special treat we have lined up for y’all in September. Next week will be looking at several video […]
I’m currently sitting here at a coffee shop with Sam, and I realized I hadn’t put up my post for this week. As I tried to think about what I should talk about, I found that I could only think about one thing: Don’t Starve, the indie game I’ve been […]
Story in video games is one of those controversial topics, though no video game would exist, let alone be successful, without story. Some of the very first debates about video games, arguments that would eventually become the foundation of Game Studies as a field, were about narratology and ludology, or […]
I don’t want to hear whining because this info is a “no duh” for you game pros. It wasn’t that long ago that we all experienced our first Steam sale. Maybe you even have a few games from that sale that you haven’t gotten around to. But let’s be honest, […]
What is a gamer? This question is at the center of what it means to study women or feminism in games. It is in this label of “gamer” that we are most often excluded. Of course we couldn’t be “gamers” because girls don’t play games, they don’t play real games, […]
What does it mean to call a game a companion? Referring to a story, or a favorite fictional character, as a companion seems easy enough to understand. I imagine that most of us had our own fantasy worlds growing up, where we were Peter Pan or Dorothy, or Falcor. We […]
Most of my posts recently have been about serious topics: procedural ethics, video game company analyses, and research methodology. Since it’s summer, I thought it would be fun to mix it up a bit for a fun post about my summer gaming style. My summer gaming habits are fairly different […]
Sam and I just had an article released in ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. You should definitely check it out, but in the mean time, here are a few choice excerpts to keep you excited. Essentially, what we were trying to do is name a feminist practice […]
As part of my dissertation work, I’m proposing a theory called Procedural Ethics, a hybrid of feminist research methodology, ethics, and procedural rhetoric. As ethics is currently growing in popularity in game studies, and feminist research methodology offers one of the most sensible and comprehensive strategies available, a hybrid methodology […]
Change is inherently a discursive project. This means that change is restricted by the structures of language and by the conventions of language use. Change will be a product of what can be legitimately said (or written) in a specific context at a specific moment in time. (For those of […]
Businesses restrict their own growth potential when women are unintentionally excluded from key training and advancement opportunities. Whether the economy is up or down, who gets promoted — and who gets left behind — has substantial consequences for business success. Ilene H. Lang, President & Chief Executive Officer, Catalyst (For […]