I recently revisited The Last of Us, and after (re)playing the game, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of gendered labor and the manner in which such labor comes to be represented. Indeed, the game’s depiction of fatherhood has been discussed quite a bit, especially when the game was […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart addresses issues of moral and ethical choices and how games designed in such a way to draw players into ethical dilemmas, moral reflection, and immersive experiences. This War of Mine: The Little Ones (TWoM), by placing the player into unfamiliar territory and in an unfamiliar role, crafts […]
Recently I had to explain slut shaming to my 7 year old daughter. Not in those terms, but for the usual reasons. While traumatized by the whole event (me, not her) I did take some pride in the fact that it was not her doing the shaming, but other little […]
A new Tropes vs. Women in Video Games episode came out earlier this month, this one specifically on body language and the male gaze. In this episode, Sarkeesian focuses especially on the notion of movement as something that “can be a powerful thing” because movement can sometimes “tell us the most […]
Last Friday, Alex Layne explored legal definitions of terrorism, stalking, and cyberbullying to draw some conclusions about cyberterrorist acts, specifically in terms of online harassment against women tagged as “social justice warriors” by the GamerGate movement. Alex’s piece ignited a firestorm on Twitter, with responses ranging from mockery and downplay […]
This semester, I’ve been working as much on game creation as on games criticism and exploration. I’m working on three different projects, one with a larger team and two others with fellow NYMG contributor Ashley, and while I’ve worked on a few small efforts from time to time in the […]
I set the controller down and looked at my computer screen. Up to this point in Undertale, there had been hints that the character –the one I named Chara–was referred to with neutral pronouns. But I didn’t think it would carry. And yet, here we were. A direct character interaction. […]
Episode 124: Alison Rapp, Nintendo, and the Future of the Games Industry (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk amongst ourselves about Nintendo’s termination of Alison Rapp, online harassment, and the future of feminism in and around the games industry. Grab a drink […]
As we prepare to write this, we sit in silence, simultaneously furious and sad. Sad because a woman we would like to call a comrade-in-arms has met with a huge injustice and furious because we live and work in a community that not only makes that kind of injustice possible, […]
A few days ago, a user posted in the Overwatch Beta feedback section of the Blizzard forums that they were uncertain about one of Tracer’s victory poses in the game, a version of the infamous butt pose. User Fipps didn’t seem to have an issue with other characters who posed […]
After completing NBA 2K’s Living Da Dream, I was left only with feelings of wishful thinking: wishing that gaming would allow characters of color to exist in a fantasy world of possibilities. Instead, we were once again handed a series of tropes, stereotypes, respectability politics, and essentialist assumptions about Black […]
I recently came across an article entitled “Between the Lines: Games and Diegesis,” in which Ian McCamant interrogates the manner in which games tell stories and the manner in which they tell stories differently than literature or film. And since these are subjects I usually find myself engaging with, McCamant’s […]
Story Time: I sit, staring at the intro screen to, of all things, Pokemon Y. I’ve been here for maybe 10 minutes, staring at a very simple question that Professor Sycamore asked, that every Professor of Pokemon Studies always asks right at the beginning of the game. “Are you a […]
Last week, around the same time that I started playing Anatomy, my sister turned me onto The Black Tapes Podcast, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the game and the podcast concurrently. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw puts it, The Black Tapes Podcast is framed “as a Serial-esque series hosted by […]
I think back to the biggest, most important moments in my life and career, and every time I have a life altering success I can directly trace it to a mentor. I failed Biology 101 twice as an undergrad. I got a C+ in my freshman English class. Somehow I […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Flame in the Flood lately; I’m playing it, my husband’s playing it, even my son played a time or two. We’re all big fans of survival games, and roguelikes; we all love scrabbling to survive another adventure, another day, and the chipper, folksy music, […]