As an avid black Friday shopper, I decided to write a post discussing my strategy for maximizing savings and minimizing frustration on black Friday. NYMG always has the best tips for which games to buy for your loved ones, and now we can be your one-stop site for everything video […]
alexlayne
211 posts
Recently there has been some discussion among our blog readers about why we find rape in video games more atrocious than murder in video games. By most accounts, murder is worse than rape—certainly the US legal system thinks so. So why do many of us feel comfortable killing over and […]
***super super duper trigger warning: rape, victim shaming, assholes*** Recently there has been a big debate about the depiction of rape in video games. I’ll recap quickly for those who haven’t heard. In the upcoming Tomb Raider game, there is a scene in which Lara Croft has to defend […]
The following video asks the question of whether or not video games are art. Enjoy! Games featured: Journey, Bastion, Braid, Sword and Sorcery, Limbo and The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom.
This post is about some recent activity that has been flourishing because of a blog post by Nice Girl on the blog Nice Girls Like Sex Too. The blog post, titled “The Dark Side of Geek Feminism” reports the perception of one woman on attending OSCON (a foss conference). Rather […]
Coming off the conversations we have been having lately on the podcast about booth babes, I thought another pertinent topic is the “fake gamer of the week” segment found at Kotaku. In this weekly blog, writers find ads and stock photos and write pithy responses mocking all of the things […]
So we have just returned from the fabulous GLS (Games, Learning, ad Society) Conference at UW Madison. It is really a great conference: a good mix of professionals from industry, developers, academics, researchers, and K-12 teachers; lots of good tech to check out and play with (as anyone who got […]
Despite how problematic I find Bogost, most of the time, he is right about some stuff. In Persuasive Games, Bogost writes, “video games deploy more abstract representations about the way the world does or should function” (100). I’ve written several blogs about how historicity functions in games like Civilization, focusing […]
A recent presentation at PAX East talked about the harassment gamers face online. In it, the posit three cardinal rules for women who want to play in online gaming environments. They are: Don’t choose a distracting name—as in, one which will remind male players that women actually exist Don’t choose […]
So I’ve been thinking about my posts lately, plus a comment a friend made to me, and I realize that a lot of what I do is talk about talking about video games rather than talking about the video games themselves. It led me to think more about the role […]
I just gave a talk at CCCC’s about the project Sam and I did on female video game podcasters. I talked about the research we had done, what we found, and what I hoped our community of academics could do with the information we found. There are two (sort of […]
“If you ask people to hire who they like, what you end up with is a homogenous team. People like people who are just like themselves.” An interview with game designer Sheri Graner Ray Sheri Graner Ray Interview (click here to listen, right click to download directly to iTunes) Transcript: […]
I originally wrote this as a rant to keep saved on my personal computer, and it was not meant to see the light of day. It was a file for me to go to when I lost my way, when my work seemed aimless, or when I needed to articulate […]
As if we needed more reasons to do the research we’re doing. In last few weeks Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler as been at the center of a major shitstorm. For those living under a rock, here is what’s been happening: An interview with Hepler from more than 5 years ago […]
There is no denying the change in perception of gamer demographics in the past few years. Video/computer games in the early to mid-90’s were made for an adolescent male audience by male programmers, though this isn’t all that surprising, considering that most of the people who would consider themselves “gamers” […]
3.Surprise On some level, platform games gives you the same thing over and over, but with a little bit different skin. This means that these games can get real repetitive, real quick. Tiny Bang Story is a game that I found had the perfect level of surprise for me without […]