Episode 60: Redeemed by the Blood: The One Drop Redemption Rule for Minority Protagonists (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) In this episode we talk about race in video game characters and discuss the possibility of the existence of the one drop redemption rule in character […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
(This is the first in a series of posts I am doing working with the theories of scholar and author Katie King. These are going to be a lead up to a special treat we have lined up for y’all in September. Next week will be looking at several video […]
As gamers and consumers we have a certain amount of power. Power that we don’t seem to realize and power that we don’t readily and regularly use. We have economic power. We have the power to throw our support behind a title, a developer, a company…or not. I for one […]
Story in video games is one of those controversial topics, though no video game would exist, let alone be successful, without story. Some of the very first debates about video games, arguments that would eventually become the foundation of Game Studies as a field, were about narratology and ludology, or […]
I’m a woman and a gamer and I have been for 37 years, since I was a girl of 7 fighting with my cousins over handheld Coleco games. 1976. Back before we even thought about female characters in games. Our characters were blips on the screen. No head, no body, […]
Remember Me, the recent cyberpunk beat-‘em-up from Capcom and Dontnod, is no stranger to scandal. Outspoken creative director Jean-Max Moris commented frequently on the game’s female protagonist and the industry at large throughout the creative cycle, telling the Penny Arcade Report and others there was resistance from potential publishers at […]
So a wise woman (thanks Pat) once told me that I was the only one that got food poisoning on a regular basis because I kept doing the unthinkable…ordering salads at bars. And that made perfect sense. Why would I go to a place famous for burgers and fried food […]
So by now most of us have heard about the demo of Killer Instinct for the XBox One yesterday, but if you haven’t let me give it a quick run down. MS brought out a man and a woman to demo the game yesterday and the woman admitted that she […]
So yeah, this post is going to be about voice. Voice has always been a huge issue with me. Not necessarily with how a voice sounds, but with the absence of voice and what that absence of voice actually means. It’s because of this that The Little Mermaid is one […]
This is a visualization based on word frequency. It has not been adjusted in any way. For my diss, I am using a two-pronged approach for analyzing gaming industry company policy. The first is a hermenuetic analysis and the second is a visual analysis. Using various methods of data visualization […]
This post is brought on by two facts this week: 1) video games can be powerful rhetorical tools and 2) I lost someone who means the world to me this week. So if it gets a bit rambly bear with me. I had been playing through Freebird Games‘ Indie RPG, […]
It’s difficult to find provocative topics to write about each week when I am drowning in dissertation work. Right now I’m working on my literature review, which though often a throwaway chapter, is crucial to my argument. The lack of overlap between important fields, and the ways I suggest we […]
Nicole’s post on video games and art has brought up something for me that is a bit of a sore spot. And that would be Jonathan Blow’s latest whack-a-doodle (yes, that is the technical term) rant on Twitter about “art” games (defined seemingly as those made by him) vs. AAA […]
Bear with me for a bit while I get to video games. We need a little context here. I remember watching a prime time news show back in 2004 where “well trained” Korean teens exclaimed that the Americans were Nazis, GW Bush was Hitler, and that America must be destroyed […]
Sometimes my brain works much like the horrible Bing search engine commercial where people jump from tangential topic to tangential topic based on keywords and loose connections. Today’s post comes from just such an idea jump that I experienced today. It started when a student in my Gender and Technology […]
Holy shit. Somebody listened. And it wasn’t just an indie game developer with nothing to lose, it was a big name AAA developer. Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez published an article yesterday (Nov. 30) on how the writers for Dragon Age 3 actually removed a portion of the game because of a […]