This post is about some recent activity that has been flourishing because of a blog post by Nice Girl on the blog Nice Girls Like Sex Too. The blog post, titled “The Dark Side of Geek Feminism” reports the perception of one woman on attending OSCON (a foss conference). Rather […]
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This year I went to GenCon. There were dice, cards, and game boards everywhere. And I loved it. There. I said. Out loud. Or wrote it. I started playing role playing games back in high school. Back when teenagers were rumored to dying in caves in our own backyard (Michigan […]
Episode 41: What It Means to Be a Female Gamer (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about what it means (to each of us) to be a woman gamer. The episode where we share a bit of what being gamers and […]
A while back we thought out loud about how much fun it would be to do a group play-through of a section of a game and just chat about it while it happened. And then Nicole moved away and things got a bit more tricky. Well, we finally finagled something […]
Episode 40: Call Me!: The Listener Email Episode (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we answer some great questions from listeners. After the usual sign off we added the audio from our video mail question and answer so don’t miss that! And our video […]
Coming off the conversations we have been having lately on the podcast about booth babes, I thought another pertinent topic is the “fake gamer of the week” segment found at Kotaku. In this weekly blog, writers find ads and stock photos and write pithy responses mocking all of the things […]
Episode 39: How Much Is That Booth Babe in the Window: Booth Babes, Feminism, and Context (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about booth babes in the larger context of feminism and sexism in the games industry. Confessions of a sometimes […]
Yesterday’s article at Kotaku about the representation of African Americans in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation hit really close to home because we were looking at two sides of the same coin. While Evan Narcisse over at Kotaku thinks that the Canadian developers are off point with their depiction of a few […]
Episode 38: Teacher, There’s a Game in My Classroom!: Games and Learning (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about games and education in like of some new moves in the field from the likes of EA, Valve, and the White House. […]
So we have just returned from the fabulous GLS (Games, Learning, ad Society) Conference at UW Madison. It is really a great conference: a good mix of professionals from industry, developers, academics, researchers, and K-12 teachers; lots of good tech to check out and play with (as anyone who got […]
A couple of weeks ago I promised that I would post the talk that I gave on games and bioethics at RSA. Now I have finally gotten around to doing it! What follows is (loosely) the text of my talk along with the slides from my presentation which have been […]
E3 is this week and most companies go for the wow factor in their conferences, but honestly, it’s been lacking that magical feeling we gamers love to have when new things are announced. Ubisoft tried to amp things up at their conference by introducing attendees to a trailer of Far Cry […]
I am a mediocre Mass Effect fangirl at best. I quit the first game because the controls and the damned planet scanning were just too friggin’ painful. I plowed into ME2, with its improved control scheme, with gusto that only died down a bit, and I powered through ME3 with […]
Episode 35 : “I’m Sexist and I Know It: Sneaky Sneaky Till the Soapbox Comes Out” (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) The episode where Sam, Alex, and Nicole record in one space and have drunch (aka drinks and lunch). They each take a turn with […]
Despite how problematic I find Bogost, most of the time, he is right about some stuff. In Persuasive Games, Bogost writes, “video games deploy more abstract representations about the way the world does or should function” (100). I’ve written several blogs about how historicity functions in games like Civilization, focusing […]
A recent presentation at PAX East talked about the harassment gamers face online. In it, the posit three cardinal rules for women who want to play in online gaming environments. They are: Don’t choose a distracting name—as in, one which will remind male players that women actually exist Don’t choose […]