When I was little, I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up. Okay, there was a short period in preschool during which I wanted to be a ballerina, but I soon realized that tights are itchy and, also, that I can’t dance. Being a cowboy seemed a much […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
For the marathon this past weekend (remember: you can still donate!), I played Hearthstone and then Left 4 Dead 2, and for the first time in the long hours I’ve put into the latter, I did not invert the controls. For years, I’ve been inverting Y axes in dozens of […]
Back in April I posted a thought piece on whether or not systems themselves can be the cause of harassment, hate, and toxicity. My post was inspired by a research study that found a strong correlation between systematic behaviors and human ones: when systems informed a player they were being […]
Last week, a friend mentioned the recently released film The Girl With All the Gifts, and its associated book. I’d never heard of either, but it’s no surprise to anyone around here that I’m a huge zombie nerd, so the trailer immediately caught my attention, because it’s a human story […]
When thinking about the ways motherhood comes to be framed in games, some questions that often come to mind are–how do games represent motherhood? What assumptions, biases, and social norms are games manifesting? Are they perpetuating normative, patriarchal constructions of motherhood? Or are some games working to complicate such constructions? […]
A lot of Game Studies proper deals with representation in games, particularly surrounding things like race, gender, sexuality, class, and body type. That may seem like the most basic statement ever (like, duh!), but as I think more about studying games as Game Studies, I need to answer questions about […]
We’ve been grappling, the past couple weeks, with a game called Bound, and we’ve been particularly struck by the game’s ambiguous narrative and by its surreal landscapes. And something we continue to ask ourselves is–what is the purpose of the conversation between the two, between the narrative and the gameworld? […]
In recent weeks and months social media and television media has given me a lot to think about in terms of the sexualization of the black body. From Lena Dunham’s ignorant comments about Odell Beckham Jr. on social media to my own experience watching a television show on Netflix to […]
My knowledge of Overwatch prior to actually playing it had nothing to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the surrounding lore. Blizzard released official information on setting, backstory, and character histories via YouTube videos both before and after the game’s official release in May of 2016, which […]
Invisibility Blues is back for a discussion of the position of games criticism within the industry, and the sometimes unfortunate response to critical work viewed as damaging to gaming communities. We would like to thank writer Tauriq Moosa for joining us this time around as we discuss our roles as critics, […]
I ended my blog post last week with some lingering questions I still have about the representation of single motherhood as a destructive and dysfunctional force in The Park, which doesn’t feel like a particularly satisfying way to wrap up my examination of the game. So I want to spend […]
This holiday weekend was one of the first times my daughter and I had to just relax and spend time alone since the beginning of the school year a month ago, so when she asked if we could stay home and write/plan/make a Minecraft machinima (like all good nerdlings), I […]
I’ll be blunt: I didn’t want to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but with the controversy around the game’s engagement with/appropriation of (depending on whom you ask) racial issues and activist movements, it’s an essential experience for someone looking for the human in the code. Mankind Divided promised humanity in […]
There is something aesthetically appealing about historical games that I value and appreciate. While I am not a huge fan of contemporary war games, I am fascinated with games that feature historical combat. One of my favorite games of all time is Call of Duty: World at War. This game […]
Last week, I interrogated manifestations of single moms and mental health in Stranger Things and The Park, but I wanted to take some more time to think about how such representations occur across the horror genre. In other words, I find myself continuing to ask—what kinds of patterns do we […]
Last month, I wrote about the ways feminist science fiction reimagines motherhood and the ways this reimagining of maternal power highlights the limitations in video games’ (often fraught) depictions of motherhood. Lately, after watching Stranger Things, I’ve been thinking particularly about articulations of single motherhood, how it is single mothers […]