In a recent article, “Apparent Feminism as a Methodology for Technical Communication and Rhetoric,” Erin Frost proposes a new methodology through which to understand the impact of technology and technological documentation: apparent feminism. Apparent feminism, she writes, “seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
Bianca: In light of the election, the two of us have found ourselves returning to the conversations we have had on building feminist coalitions–that is, we have found ourselves reflecting on both the consistent, perpetual need for such work and the challenges that result from embarking on such work. Previously, […]
Spoiler Alert: This article contains heavy discussion of the plot and characters of Supergiant Games’ Transistor. I should state now, as a white person who can pass very easily (despite wishing I didn’t) as a straight woman, I have a lot of privilege. I had a lot of privilege before […]
Games and Culture recently published a fascinating article,”Framing Gaming: The Effects of Media Frames on Perceptions of Game(r)s”, written by Anna Sophie Kümpel and Alexander Haas, about the influence of media portrayals of video games and gamers on beliefs about gaming. Now, it might seem like the simplest thing in the […]
For this, the forth post in the series of posts that I have written about Mafia III and Luke Cage, I wanna play around with the notion of freedom and the ways that freedom gets enacted or enacted upon in the narrative we play. While my previous posts have used as […]
It’s election day here in the United States! Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken opens the way I open most conversations with games scholars: with a discussion of the idea of a game. What even is a game, anyway? Where she differs here from most, however, is that instead of discussing […]
To start things off, I’m going to be honest with everyone: I’m not big on sports. I wasn’t just the kid that got picked last for gym class, I was the kid who got a stomach ache so he wouldn’t have to play. I didn’t even have to fake the […]
I’ve been reading Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought, and as a result I’ve been revisiting the ways feminist science fiction and video games converse and intersect. In the past, I’ve interrogated this conversation by specifically examining the different ways motherhood is represented in feminist science fiction […]
I spend a lot of time, much more time than I should, thinking about just what games are. Not what they mean to us, though also that, but what they are, where they begin and end, and what place we the players have in considerations of games. This is a […]
It’s hard for me not to get into the Halloween spirit. In addition to being a huge fan of dressing up in costumes and consuming vast quantities of sugar, Halloween is my birthday, and that adds a whole new dimension of fun and mayhem to the holiday. My sophomore year […]
Some spoilers here for the second episode of the third season of Black Mirror, “Playtest.” The shift of Black Mirror to Netflix, with the release of the third season of the dire science-fiction show just in time for Halloween is making some waves. Black Mirror has got to be one of […]
I’m a year late, but I’m finally playing Until Dawn. I feel like I’m having an entirely different experience with the game this year than I would have last year because this year, I’m playing during the election. I imagine that had I played last year, I would have plowed […]
I’ve written about games and stories and the connection between game studies and literary studies in the past, but after continuing to watch Westworld, I find myself coming back to this network of relationships, this interplay between game and story. Because something that Westworld has brought to mind for me […]
This might sound blasphemous, but the women in Mafia III and Luke Cage fascinate me most. These women are simultaneously complex and maddeningly shallow. I say this to mean there is centuries of tears, laughter, abuse, and love tied up in each and every one of them, but at the same […]
I’ve written about Overwatch before, and my reasons for finally caving and playing Blizzard’s massive online battle arena (MOBA) game were deeply rooted in my experience with the fandom. As a gamer and a fan of two of Blizzard’s other major IPs, Diablo and Starcraft, the fact that I didn’t […]
One child grows up to be Somebody that just loves to learn And another child grows up to be Somebody you’d just love to burn -“Family Affair,” Sly and the Family Stone (1971) Family. It’s a big deal for me. I live and die for mine. I am a fierce […]