We all know Ceiling Cat loves watching us play games. I have my own furry mob that games along with me too: one Great Dane and two Boston Terriers. Often when I stream you can catch them scooting across the camera, wrestling, chewing on bones, and annoyingly jumping into my […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
A quick stroll through the Playstation or Xbox stores reveals the distinct lack of a once-common feature: demos. A search of the Steam store returned 15 demos released since the beginning of June, most for free but some available only for purchase. Many of these demos, however, are for games […]
Last week saw the disbanding of the Frag Dolls, a group of female professional gamers that was formed in 2004 to demo and promote Ubisoft games as well as to participate in professional competitions (they became the first all-female clan to win a pro circuit tournament–CPL–in 2006). The first team […]
Moms have it rough, man. I’m talking socially, of course, considering the fact that the United States is only one of two countries in the world that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers. (Get it together, United States.) But I’m also talking representationally, and it is this particular […]
Downloadable content in theory is a lovely idea. It means that games we love will never be static, and we can continue playing them and exploring new content and loving them for much longer than if they had remained as they were at launch. Lately, though, I wonder if that’s […]
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Han Solo, or Princess Leia, or some sort of princess hybrid of the two. They were my heroes. Sometimes I wanted to be a female Robin Hood instead, or Laura Ingalls or a character from a fairy tale, but whatever the […]
I have always been a huge advocate of ethical reflection and thoughtfulness in the classroom. I believe that regardless of what you teach about or what you teach with, you should be cognizant of the possible ramifications for your students. For example, I gave a talk in 2011 about how […]
A few weeks ago, Polygon editor Arthur Gies published his review on The Witcher 3, an action-based role-playing game developed by CD Projekt RED and based on the Polish fantasy novel of the same name. Though Gies’ review was largely positive and although he still admitted that The Witcher 3 […]
After writing about Among the Sleep a few weeks ago, I have found myself continually thinking about the idea of children as protagonists. Indeed, I have been working to understand just what it is about the embodiment of childhood that is at work in such figures. In other words, what […]
While I have spent the last three decades of my life being as politically active as was feasible at any given time and being as verbal about said politics as I could, I have to admit that doing the same with my work as a games scholar has not been […]
[Spoiler warning: The following post covers some potentially triggering content and contains major plot spoilers for Life is Strange Episode 2: Out of Time and some slight conversation/situation based spoilers for Life is Strange Episode 3: Chaos Theory.] The warning signs were there from the start of the second episode: […]
I recently read an essay by Ann Friedman entitled “On Being a Badass,” in which Friedman explores what it means for women to be considered badasses in today’s corporate landscape. As Friedman explains, the term badass generally seems to imply “both toughness and disaffectedness. It’s rare to look at someone […]
Sometimes gamers forget that the virtual worlds we participate in, while they often become as much our “real” world as meat space, are not subject to the same laws of freedom of speech as our meat space. When we participate on forums, chat within a game, or send someone a […]
Last October, Sega released Alien: Isolation, and much of the discussion around the game has dealt with its pacing, its level of difficulty, its relationship and faithfulness to the film franchise, and whether or not the game is successfully scary. Relatively little discussion has occurred, however, regarding the manner in […]
As women, we are taught from a young age to fear the unknown. It is our responsibility to avoid dark alleys, short skirts, abusive men, or any other abnormal and risky behavior. Today people are too savvy about political correctness to say some of these things out loud; ie. you […]
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.” […]