I think back to the biggest, most important moments in my life and career, and every time I have a life altering success I can directly trace it to a mentor. I failed Biology 101 twice as an undergrad. I got a C+ in my freshman English class. Somehow I […]
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I’ve been thinking a lot about The Flame in the Flood lately; I’m playing it, my husband’s playing it, even my son played a time or two. We’re all big fans of survival games, and roguelikes; we all love scrabbling to survive another adventure, another day, and the chipper, folksy music, […]
Episode 122: “We Got You A Pony!”: A Conversation with Lauren Stone and Travis Stout (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we return to Trumbull Valley for more discussions with folks from behind the scenes on State of Decay, the game that […]
My vision is pretty bad, and it’s been pretty bad since the fourth grade. My night vision is even worse. I have heard optometrists utter “whoa” during appointments (which, in my opinion, is never a great thing to hear a doctor say). That Twilight Zone episode in which the guy’s glasses […]
Michonne is my favorite character in The Walking Dead universe, in both the show and the comic, so when word came down that she was the first of the characters to get her own Telltale outing, I was thrilled (other comic characters have shown up, but never served as the […]
In academia, there are constant fights about disciplinary boundaries: you can’t teach ethics in a course: that belongs to philosophy; you can’t say the word history in a course description; you can’t touch certain authors. Disciplinary boundaries can be a good thing: they let scholars know they have a home; […]
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about female characters and when I choose to play them and when I don’t and for some reason bell hooks’ book, Outlaw Culture, has really been haunting me. The whole book is pretty amazing and was written during the […]
I recently started playing This War of Mine: The Little Ones, and thus far I’ve put about 5 hours into the game. My first reaction as of now: hot, boiling tears of sadness and desperation running down my face — there may have been some snot in there too. The game […]
I’ve been writing a lot the past couple weeks about metanarrativity and postmodernism, about how such things manifest themselves in games like The Magic Circle, like Until Dawn, like Pony Island. And I hope you’ll bear with me while I indulge myself in expanding on some of these ideas a […]
I actually like to stream when I play games. I do it so that I can play games with friends and strangers even when I am playing a single player game or sitting at home in my game room all by myself. So doing streaming marathons to raise money for […]
I get it. I know. You just “don’t really see a problem” with objectification of female characters. You don’t really think racial representation is an issue. You think people are just taking it all too personally. I want to talk to you about this, though, because you’re part of our […]
Episode 121: Everything Is Awful: But For Now We Fight (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). The episode in which we talk about our lives and how we see them matching up with the questionable methods of disagreement on the internet. It reminds us all […]
NYMG is by no means new to streaming on Twitch and we’re certainly not new to talking about it. (Sarah’s mentioned her own plights as a woman streaming here and Alex comments on her love for the gaming community in Twitch here); I, however, I’m just getting my feet wet. […]
Last week, I wrote about a game called Pony Island and the manner in which the game makes use of metanarrativity. And I also mentioned that my interest in such a narrative technique stems from my location as a literary studies scholar—an interest that has extended my consideration of such […]
This week, I’ve been reading Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design, a book that, in 2003, outlined some of the challenges the industry was facing in terms of expanding the market and being more welcoming to female gamers. Tracy Lien’s 2013 look at early trends in video game marketing […]
This weekend we ran our 24 hour streaming Mammothon to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. On Saturday many of our staff members and our families played a lot of games and talked about them and to our audiences for what we consider a great cause. This streaming […]