So, an odd thing has happened since the end of last year when I lost my urge to shoot things (in the game), I have once again found my love of puzzle based games. It started with me playing more games on my phone and on my 3DS because they […]
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LEGO has always been fiercely protective of its brand and reputation, and even though their decisions don’t always make sense, they have tried to stay away from politics and violent themes. Their approach has always seemed somewhat contradictory to me. I’ve written about their aversion to politics before, and I […]
This week, I came across an article by E. McNeill called “History and Games” in which McNeill makes connections between the subject of history and the subject of video games. Indeed, McNeill engages in such a discussion even though, as he says, many “people seem to view history as dry […]
Recently, as I re-read Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design, I kept thinking about the differences between the games Koster was using as examples and the games I’ve most often been writing about lately, the indies and the so-called walking simulators, games that often have low levels […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about my transition to Games Studies this last semester and the role it plays (and will play) in my research as a Second Language Studies student; I’ve also been pondering on the role of intersectionality lately, specifically how Latoya Peterson admonishes in her article, Intersectionality […]
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others? -Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1957. It only seems fitting that the 5th anniversary of Not Your Mama’s Gamer fell on the weekend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday celebration. While many folks around the […]
Episode 119: Sometimes We Study Vaginas: The 5th Anniversary Episode (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). Tomorrow marks our fifth(!) anniversary, and in celebration, we gathered the whole current crew for this episode to talk games, origin stories, and why some of us refuse to […]
I recently read a piece by Thomas McMullan called “From Minecraft to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, How Real Life Imitates the Games We Play” in which McMullan discusses Oscar Wilde’s argument that life imitates art: “Wilde wrote that life imitates art more than art imitates life. We look at […]
When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s […]
Social media has been employed as a significant site of mobilizing for Black Lives Matter especially with the power of Black Twitter. This form of “social public” as Andre Brock outlines allows users to generate culturally relevant content and disseminate it to their audience. And that scope is beyond the […]
Christmas break is always an interesting time. You get to see and talk to people who you haven’t seen or talked to for a sustained period of time for a while. It becomes even more interesting when you play and/or study video games and the community that surrounds them. Some […]
Warning: MGSV spoilers, discussions of sexual violence and war within. Metal Gear is and has always been a weird beast. Sometimes the good guys are bad guys are good guys on the side and sometimes they’re all clones and have maybe exchanged a body part or two. In this universe, […]
This holiday season, with the release of Star Wars, I found myself thinking a lot about fandom and how our love of various things (games, LEGO, movie franchises, etc.) becomes part of our conversations in both real life and on the internet. I’m not a fan of Star Wars. I […]
In my last post, I talked about the fact that my own liminal position as someone working concurrently within several fields—namely, literary studies, game studies, and women’s studies—has caused me to think a lot about how it is I might make use of these fields’ overlapping and similar concerns to […]
Episode 118: Who Gets to Be a Gamer?: A Conversation with Latoya Peterson (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk to the fabulous Latoya Peterson, creator of Fusion’s Girl Gamer documentary. A rousing conversation about gaming as women, online games community, […]
I took a feminist methodologies class this past semester, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make use of feminist methodologies in my own work and my own research on games and literature. What seems important when conceptualizing of such thinking and practice is that there […]