The first day at PAX East is extremely overwhelming. As the escalator descended into a landscape of colossal screens and mainstream logos, I wove through throng after thong of colorful cosplayers and eager gamers on the EXPO floor. I attempted to wait in line for the Oculus Rift but the […]
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The ways that I see my seemingly divergent areas of scholarly study constantly coming together still continues to amaze me after years of doing game studies work. This week in my Minority Rhetorics graduate seminar we had a great conversation about Gloria Anzuldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and blaxpolitation. To keep it brief […]
Social media hubs around GamerGate — both sides — have been in rare form this week, with much discussion ignited anew. It’s not surprising, really; a lot’s happened lately, with controversies around Reddit and GamerGate-related subs, GDC and PAX East and the relaunch of Offworld. Yesterday, however, things took a […]
As an experiment last week, I boxed up my Xbox 360. I’m trying to downsize, and I wanted to see how I would feel about using the Xbox One exclusively. I was only a couple of days into this experiment when I realized it was not going to work. Like […]
I’d ask you to do a quick google image search for the phrase “hardcore gamer”, but if you’re familiar with gaming at all you don’t need to. Heck, you probably wouldn’t need to even if you weren’t very familiar with gaming, because everyone knows what a hardcore gamer looks like- […]
Yesterday, we talked about today’s relaunch of Offworld as a site dedicated to women and minorities in gaming, but we didn’t talk much about why that’s a good thing, or rather, a necessary thing. Since the announcement of the new site, I’ve been watching social media discussions around the move, […]
This week at GDC’s #1ReasonToBe panel, as we excitedly discussed on our podcast, Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson announced the relaunch of BoingBoing’s Offworld as a site focused on women’s and minority voices in gaming. Longtime critic and author Alexander will serve as Offworld’s new editor-in-chief, and Laura Hudson, Senior […]
Gamers face a number of stereotypes that have negative impacts. You have the gaming addicts, the basement dwellers, the overly sexualized gamer girl, and much more. It’s sad and unfortunate but the term gamer can have bad connotations. Stereotypes do nothing but generalize a grouping of people, robbing them of […]
There has been some interesting news coming out of GDC this year and it makes me sad that I wasn’t able to swing a visit to SFO, but next year…. Now that being said Todd Harper (Univ. of Baltimore) gave a talk at GDC yesterday where he talked about how […]
Episode 96: It’s All About Community: A Chat with Dave Hulegaard (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about games and narrative with sci-fi/paranormal author and Bioware Canada Community Manager, David Hulegaard (davidhulegaard.com).
Fresh from multiple narrative and writing based GDC panels, my head has been full of theories on best incorporating narrative into game design and all the ways narrative reveals itself in games. At one writing roundtable today, an attendee proposed a question on how to explore and build a game’s […]
What exactly marks a good writer? I don’t know that there’s a real answer, even with two creative writing degrees under my belt. I can break down a story and analyze the elements, the way everything fits together, the way it might weigh in on various scales of quality, both […]
Imagine two passionate music fans. They play their favorite albums and songs every chance they get; they read blogs, go to shows, buy merch, maybe even get some sweet tattoos. In short, the music they enjoy is so central to them that in many ways it becomes a part of […]
Here is my confession for the day. I play Farmville on my phone…and I like it. It’s an all too familiar trope, by now. Core gamers play “real” games like Halo, Warcraft, Dark Souls, or League of Legends. Girl “gamers” play Candy Crush. I’ve written before about gaming identity and […]
Ok, the title is a little provocative, but this post might not be as outrageous as you might think. This week I’ve been re-reading Earnest Cline’s Ready Player One with one of my classes and it has really made me nostalgic for the games of my youth. I spent a […]
Last week a witch hunt pervaded the Hearthstone community. Like most witch hunts, it spawned from a baseless accusation: a top Hearthstone player is not who they say they are. This statement, which was little more than a rumor, quickly became accepted as fact as it spread across Hearthstone communities, […]