Recently while playing The Division with a friend, he pointed out that you could kill the dogs that wander around the town. For those who haven’t played, there are often dogs walking around the post-pandemic landscape. They don’t bite or jump or attack. They just bark randomly and otherwise mind […]
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Episode 127: Brains and Games: A Chat Deborah Budding on Neurodiversity and Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with Deborah Budding (@Nebula63), neuropsychologist and podcaster at neurocurious.org This week we talk about neurodiversity, brains, and games. We also about environmental, social, […]
As I sat down to give my post a once over before running it today I got a Twitter notification that lots of people were sharing that same tweet so, being the ultimate procrastinator, I clicked over to see what was going on. It was the story of the auctioning […]
It takes a special kind of determination to take on games like checkers, Go, and chess, games that are such solid pillars of life that they simply are, but here comes Tak, aiming to do just that very thing: enter the realm of abstract strategy, with a long historical narrative […]
I sit here today wrestling with this question for a very good reason. A summer camp I’ve been involved in is on the precipice of being shut down. The camp is designed to get middle and high school aged girls involved in IT, computer science, and video games. Last year […]
Occasionally, I hear the argument that LEGO has lost its way and instead of encouraging kids to be creative, LEGO now encourages kids to simply follow the directions in the box. Normally, this argument comes from people who seem to be looking nostalgically at their own childhoods, which likely included […]
Lately I’ve been wondering just what game culture is anymore. I’m a member of a number of gaming groups in my professional life, in my hobbies, and across the Internet, and conversations are never just restricted to games. In generally feminist/gamer spaces, conversations skew all over the place; in our […]
So this week I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diversity and the insidious nature of racism. More specifically I’ve been looking at and thinking about something that gets called by Claude M. Steele, in Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, a stereotype threat. According to […]
I’ve been watching the second season of Fargo, which is a great show. The second season is set in the 70’s, so much like Mad Men, the sexism is blindingly obvious, as it was in the first season of Fargo. The portrayals of sexism in both seasons are a bit […]
You may or may not believe this, but studying games isn’t always fun. In fact, sometimes it’s downright horrible. Ask any PhD student who is researching video games from any kind of critical perspective and they will tell you: games are full of some of the most defeating, vitriolic, toxic […]
Episode 126: A Conversation Under the Shade Tree With André Brock. (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with André Brock (aka @DocDre). André is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan and is currently completing a […]
I’m taking a course right now in which we’re examining the dominant affects of modernist and postmodern literature, and as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dominant affects of alienation and paranoia and how such ideas might be made manifest in the realm of video games. The […]
I’ve been busy lately, moving and working, and because of that, I haven’t had much time to play. So instead of sitting down to something longer, I’ve been trying out free-to-play games on Steam, playing two new releases in the last week and poking at a few others. The first, The […]
One of my favorite places on the internet is the LEGO Subreddit. Unlike some other subreddits, the one for LEGO fans is filled mostly with people who want to share and discuss their hobby. I’ve been following the LEGO subreddit for some time now, and I’ve found the space to […]
It’s no surprise that people generally think the internet has made our society more violent and toxic. Perhaps it’s not the internet as much as the anonymity it provides, but either way. Hate, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and all kinds of fear-based/difference-based abuse has always existed, of course. We didn’t need […]