Like our blog? Do you enjoy playing and thinking critically about games? Want to do something in the gaming industry but worry you don’t have the “tech” skills? Well you may not know it, but even without skills to make the games, there are still ways that you can further […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
Episode 66: Put An Ace Bandage On Those Things: Talking Games Research with Carly Finseth (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) The episode where we talk about games research, why we do what we do, and where we go from here.
I wanted to keep expanding on my look into game covers, but I think it’s important to search beyond the top-selling mainstream titles and most-hyped games across consoles proper, just to see if trends continue past the very middle of the mainstream, so this week I’m doing something a little […]
Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading Miguel Sicart’s latest book, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay and giggling at the passage that read Cocktail parties are terrible places for doing philosophy. Yet when a polite stranger asks me what I do, I end up awkwardly explaining […]
For the next phase of my research on game covers, I initially planned to look at this year’s releases, but found myself instead falling through an Internet black hole and browsing the listings for the next generation releases. After I was done calculating all the money I would need to […]
It’s easy to get lost in all the bad things in the gaming community. It seems like everywhere you look there are sexual assaults, exploitations, racism, and so on. We critique a lot on this site, but we do it for one reason: we love gaming. We love the community, […]
When Gears of War first debuted in 2006, I hated the game — the controls felt wrong to me, the game bored me, and everyone I knew was obsessed with it, which made me hate it more out of sheer annoyance. So if you’d told me that seven years later […]
After spending some time earlier this year exploring the cover for Remember Me and other games featuring protagonists in comparable poses, I decided to do a little further study into game packaging, tallying the types of figures featured on best-selling game covers. I’ve seen a lot of game covers in […]
In the past few weeks I have played both Saints Row IV and Grand Theft Auto V. Numerical markers aside these games have a lot in common. Both of them involve crime (and lots of it), both build characters based on horrible stereotypes, both drip sexism, and both a super […]
**spoilers** (up to 60% of the game) Playing GTA V, you expect a few things: racism, sexism, violence. Buying a copy is a kind of tacit agreement that you will be getting offended some time in the near future. I don’t think anyone expected respectful portrayals of women (there […]
Episode 63: A Cornucopia of Topics: We’ve Got Plenty to Talk About (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) Join us as we talk about the resurgence of the argument that violent games make violent people as well as our early thoughts on Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft […]
Surely you’ve heard Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser’s take on Grand Theft Auto V’s three male protagonists by now: “The concept of being masculine was so key to this story.” And they can’t just shoehorn anything in, you know. It’s got to work with the narrative. They had a story […]
So, this week I went against my better judgement and rented Saints Row IV. I got drawn into the hype. I heard a million other podcasters talk about how it was just plain, old “stupid fun”. And this was the kind of week that I needed some good old fashioned […]
There was a thoughtful response to my last post, Female Game Protagonists: Engendering Power Through Assemblages. I wanted to respond in the comment section, but it got a little out of control and just became another post. If you missed the last post, it was about using the idea of […]
Writer Jennifer Hepler has been in the spotlight again recently, as she announced she was leaving BioWare. The minute the news hit, stories cropped up that she was leaving over the extreme harassment she suffered over a 2006 interview in which she said she didn’t actually enjoy, or was good […]
Video games have always involved a lot of death and I’m usually okay with that. I kill people, people kill me. It’s tit for tat. I get that. But lately it seems that games have taken on an emotional bent that ask the player to experience those deaths in a […]