I recently finished playing through Killbrite Studio’s Among the Sleep (2014), and after falling through a wormhole of online reviews, blog posts, and comment sections regarding people’s reviews and interpretations of the game, I have been thinking quite a lot about the representation of children, children-heroes, and children-victims in video games. […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
Alison Tieman, face of The Honey Badger Brigade and noted Men’s Rights Activist, was banned along with her #GamerGate-affiliated booth from the Calgary Expo. She subsequently released a seemingly heartfelt video discussing the incident. If you need details, there is a fabulous write up of the story with relevant background that […]
There are a few things I noticed in the Final Fantasy XV Duscae demo that have made me a bit concerned for the highly anticipated upcoming addition to the Final Fantasy series. The automatic camera angles are jarring and have a nasty habit of changing right when you’re trying to […]
Not long ago, Sam and I wrote about the monetary burden of performing critical work, and that and related issues have been a hot topic lately, with many discussions about gaming, cost, and access going down on social media. In the interest of continuing that discussion, and as part of […]
I’ve been waiting for Act 2 of Broken Age for over a year, and it’s finally here! Broken Age, Double Fine’s point-and-click adventure, was released in two parts, and, as I wrote about last year, the end Act 1 sort of broke my brain. Act 1 really impressed me because […]
Last week I wrote about diversity in State of Decay, but I focused on only a very concrete, measurable aspect of diversity, raw numbers, when I broke down the ratios of white characters versus PoC in Undead Labs’ game. As I said in that piece, though, the numbers don’t tell the […]
Perhaps you’ve already decided this is going to be a piece ripping apart the so-called “dudebro.” That’s fair. I’m occasionally brash. I often believe my opponents are delusional, and I have no problem stating so in an argument. There is a long list of behaviors and beliefs I consider irrational […]
The very first time I tried my hand at streaming I was hit on. I had just returned from GameStop with my just-purchased gaming headset – I had never really seen the need for one before as I rarely game online – and was a bit giddy to get started […]
Back in 2013, Maddie Myers wrote about what it costs to be a “real” gamer, and when she referenced it recently, we couldn’t help but look around at our own costs of the work we do for this unfunded, volunteer-only site. The harsh reality of games criticism—or, as Myers puts […]
I’m not one to believe that gaming is a metaphor for life, but sometimes there are some truly uncanny moments and I had one of those this week. Recently my 6 year old started playing Pokemon Y on her own 3DS (she “played” X with me on mine when it […]
For an Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL), the term dark ages refers to the time period between playing with LEGO as a child and picking it back up again, later, as an adult. I experienced such a dark age in both gaming and with LEGO. Although, I have no way […]
State of Decay feels very diverse; you begin story mode as a black man and the first person who joins you and your friend is a Latina. In Lifeline, you begin as a female soldier fighting alongside a Hawaiian man and a black man. Often, in Breakdown, it’s easy to play […]
Last night, some of the women of the NYMGamer team started tweeting under #yesIplay. #yesIplay is about telling the stories of of “gamers”—a term we’re using loosely here—that are often silenced or questioned. video games, board games, whatever and however you want to define it. #yesIplay is intersectional; we want to hear […]
I recently had an enthralling conversation with a close friend about the various representations of strong female characters. My friend, using Morrigan from the first Dragon Age game as an example, explained that the sorceress doesn’t have to forfeit her traditionally feminine appearance to be a strong and able character. […]
The minute I saw that Vice branched out to Vice Gaming, I was thrilled. Vice is a lot of things: Vice Magazine started in Canada in 1994 and quickly gained a reputation for having politically incorrect, provocative content. In 2002, the British edition of Vice was started, and by 2007 […]
Romance can sometimes be a tricky and troubling thing, and it appears that this is no different in the the virtual world. In my review of Story of Seasons, a new addition to the Harvest Moon franchise that had to undergo a name change due to licensing issues, I described […]