Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn is often mentioned as playing on a number of horror tropes. Everyone can survive (depending), the two sex-craziest teens may have a real heart-to-heart about vulnerability (maybe), the ostensible Final Girl could meet her maker while others survive (possibly), and the black guy might make it (if […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the construction of motherhood in Alien: Isolation and Among the Sleep, and since then, I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and thinking a lot about how parenthood is constructed in this game as well. Indeed, it would seem that, […]
The following is a rough timeline of sexist incidents in the gaming sphere since the 1980s, including releases of notable (and notorious) titles, issues within and around studios, developers, and other professionals, and cultural events. It isn’t a “complete” timeline because no timeline can be complete; some incidents have been […]
Recently, a reader approached us and asked if we could share this exclusive story detailing her experiences within the games industry. The following relates her time spent working for a major studio’s big game release. The NYMG editorial staff stands with the writer in sharing her perspective on events, and […]
Recently, a reader approached us and asked if we could share this exclusive story detailing her experiences within the games industry. The following relates her time spent working for a major studio’s big game release. The NYMG editorial staff stands with the writer in sharing her perspective on events, and […]
Alisha recently alerted me to a piece making the rounds on Facebook called “Ghoul, You’ll Be a Woman Soon: Supernatural Puberty and the Horror of Periods,” in which Emalie Soderback discusses a subgenre of film that she likes to call “supernatural-period-girl-horror.” Soderback begins this examination by laying its foundations: Rosemary’s […]
This weekend, several NYMG staffers (and friends!) are gearing up for the 2015 Extra Life marathon, a 24-hour frenzy of gaming for charity. We will be hosting streams from several of our members on the official NYMG Twitch channel, but below we have listed individual channels along with a preview […]
Last week, I read an article by Mike Mariani called “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies,” and it got me thinking about the folkloric and mythological trajectory of the undead. Indeed, what strikes me about Mariani’s article is his argument that our current pop culture iterations of the zombie whitewash […]
Not long ago, I started playing State of Decay again. I know, I know, but at this point, it’s become a comfort object for me, something to help me relax during a busy week. I started a new Breakdown game and fiddled a little with Lifeline again, and looking at […]
My parents came out to visit last weekend, and while they were here, my mom and I played through the first few hours of Until Dawn together. As we played, I was reminded of the fact that, growing up (and still), I often bonded with my mom over horror movies, […]
Our work at NYMG has always been in service of making games better for everyone. This includes the community that loves games, the industry that makes them, and the academics that talk about them incessantly (myself included). Some people don’t like the way we go about this. In particular, some […]
I’ve been thinking about cheating and games a lot lately. It’s not surprising. At least half the time, when I give my elevator pitch, whoever I’m talking too equates what I study, gaming community support sites and the information gamers share there, with cheating. Responses like “You mean those ways […]
Somehow I missed this LEGO commercial from last year, but this week Facebook has been showing it to me daily. It’s a good commercial, but not a perfect commercial. The commercial shows a girl playing with LEGO sets as well as creating her own LEGO builds while integrating the creations […]
Last week, I had to read Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century for a course on antebellum American literature that I’m taking this semester, and in it, Margaret Fuller critiques the gender hierarchies and relationship patterns that she saw occurring in the nineteenth century. But one moment in the […]
So this week I finally played Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. I haven’t purchased the game for home because I have a ridiculous backlog of games that have come out in the last month and Fallout 4 and Tomb Raider are both looming for release next month. But […]
I read an article by Margaret Atwood recently in which she discusses the idea of freedom and argues that, today, we are “double-plus unfree” due to the fact that, as Atwood puts it, we have “handed the keys to those who promised to be our defenders but who have become, […]