Last week, I reviewed the first hour of Flying Mollusk’s Nevermind, which mostly meant I worked my way through the training session and a bit of the first real part of the game. In my initial gameplay, I was introduced to some heavy possible directions for the narrative: an alcoholic mother, […]
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Does someone who hates you deserve your pity? Your understanding? You empathy? A friend of mine once said that she feels bad for the men she argues with on sports fan websites, because it’s clear no one has ever loved them. They’ve never been touched by a hand that signified […]
Last week, I shared some analysis of gender signifiers in character models from State of Decay, a game that seems to do a good job of presenting practically dressed and designed characters, while also featuring some diversity in body types and more. A commenter pointed out, however, that including some […]
Recently I was asked by a group of graduate students (not my own) why I do games research. It’s a question that I get frequently and the answer is not usually what people expect. Or at least not fully so. They expect me to tell them how I see my […]
The Final Fantasy franchise is certainly known for some “offbeat” character outfits. Between the excessive ornamental decoration and strange mishmashes of different styles and themes, fans have come to expect unique interpretations of style in every new edition. After years of some visually stunning and detailed but occasionally odd clothing […]
In some ways my experience last week could have been the closing scene from a cheesy Disney movie: a girl enters the room and a hush falls across the crowd. The sudden arrival seemed to have fundamentally changed the character of the environment. Except, of course, it wasn’t a ball […]
I first wrote about Nevermind last year after reading about the developers’ goals for the game via their Kickstarter campaign. Nevermind was billed as a horror game with a twist: the more fear the player feels, the harder the game gets. The intention here is to help players learn to […]
I’m back! After a semester hiatus, I’m thrilled to be back in the mix. Dr. Craig Anderson, a Professor at Iowa State, has made his career on proving the negative effects of video games on youth. He is the figurehead for this movement, and he is the primary source and […]
With the release of the upgraded State of Decay Year One Survival Edition just around the corner, it seemed a good time to revisit the original game, which I explored at length over the months after release in terms of realism and representation (as well as gameplay and mechanics). At […]
Vampires are fascinating in that they operate on the fringe of a culture and society. In some ways, they represent the ultimate outcast, often othered for their monsterness, and because of it, they needn’t adhere to what’s traditional or considered socially acceptable. In some instances, they’re almost auto-excluded from social […]
In the first of what we hope will be a robust series, we present a critically focused Let’s Play of the second episode of Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange, in which we explore representation, characterization, mechanics, branching narratives, and choice lines from two very different playthroughs.
Get the new episode! (Right click and save as to download, or hit us up on iTunes or Stitcher) This week, we talked games and mental illness with Philippe A. Ménard, a scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal, among other things, who recently held forth on anxiety and depression in gamers at […]
Patience is an essential component of farming and, as it turns out, is a value I wish I had used when I decided to purchase the most recent “official” Harvest Moon release, Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley. As you might remember from my previous review on the title, I had […]
This week, I’ve been playing Life is Strange, rereading I am Charlotte Simmons, and thinking about unlikable characters. Both Life is Strange and I am Charlotte Simmons are filled with characters that I just do not like, but nevertheless I’m fully invested in both narratives this week. Unlikable characters often […]
In Game of Thrones the character Varys poses a riddle. Three men each command a swordsman to kill the other two. One man is a king, one is a rich man, one is a priest. The question, then, is who among the three has the most power, and therefore the […]
Life Is Strange is shaping up to be one of the most innovative games around right now, but the innovation is so invisible and well crafted that you might not even see it. Dontnod’s sophomore effort is taking the dramatic episodic adventure to all new levels with the second installment, “Out of […]