Miguel Sicart defines games as systems “in which the rules force the player to face ethical dilemmas, or in which the rules themselves raise ethical issues.” The game rules force players to interact in specific ways in order to confront ethical issues. In this manner, Life is Strange asks players to […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
Sometimes it really is about ethics—or is it? GamerGate members (ostensibly) launched a site this week called Deep Freeze, which, in their own words, aims to serve as “a journalism reference resource, conceived to supply a reader with easy-digestible[sic] information to determine the reliability of an individual writer or outlet.” […]
Last week I wrote about diversity in State of Decay, but I focused on only a very concrete, measurable aspect of diversity, raw numbers, when I broke down the ratios of white characters versus PoC in Undead Labs’ game. As I said in that piece, though, the numbers don’t tell the […]
A recent study out of Germany, “Sexist Games =Sexist Gamers? A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Video Game Use and Sexist Attitudes,” attempts to assess whether playing sexist video games contribute to sexist attitudes in real world situations. Since its release, members of the gaming community have argued as […]
When I tell people I teach game design, they often immediately assume I do programming. And yes, I do some of that, but as anyone that teaches game design will tell you, it’s much more than that. Increasingly I think of my job as advocating for a compositional approach to […]
The minute I saw that Vice branched out to Vice Gaming, I was thrilled. Vice is a lot of things: Vice Magazine started in Canada in 1994 and quickly gained a reputation for having politically incorrect, provocative content. In 2002, the British edition of Vice was started, and by 2007 […]
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 […]
One of the many things that we talked about in episode 97 of the podcast (it’s a good one and you should go back and listen to it right after you finish reading this post) was the incredible lack of diversity among the popular Twitch streamers and YouTubers. While there […]
The term “serious games” is problematic. We play for fun and enjoyment, yes, but the idea behind serious games is that they are somehow more impactful…more real…than other games. But these games also try to fill a void that is lacking in the world of AAA titles and platformers. Serious […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
My post for today was going to be specifically about Evan Narcisse’s article that talked about video games’ blackness problem, but as I sit down to write I find that it is only going to be tangentially connected. Video games do have a blackness problem…and so do video game players. […]
The internet is for porn The internet is for porn Why you think the net was born? Porn, porn, porn. ~”The Internet is For Porn,” Avenue Q I like innuendo. Sex jokes. Swear words. “Romantic” scenes in books and movies. Dark humor. I’m also Ms. Prim-and-Proper on the surface. It’s […]
I chuckle as I write this because I almost think that it will be more troll bait that will bring us more comments about feminazis and all of the awful things that should happen to them (yes, we don’t share those with you folks), but I have to write it. […]