Space travel has always been fascinating to me. Not fascinating enough to make me want to actually go to space, but definitely intriguing enough to watch it from afar. I blame this, in part, on my mother. When I was a child we watched Star Trek every Sunday. It was […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
It’s that time of year for academics. The time when we are frantically trying to finish our course planning for fall classes (done!) and do something…anything to make ourselves feel like we’ve made adequate progress on our research projects over the summer. Did we read enough articles or books, did […]
Nine strangers sit in a circle, myself included, as my partner walks around. He’s waiting to see who we vote for. Because at least two of the people in the circle are Werewolves, and have been eating villagers left and right. The village had already failed to identify the Werewolves […]
In the recent weeks and months I have found myself asking the question over and over again, “Why would you shoot an unarmed or restrained person when they were not a threat?” and the answer has bounced back and forth between hatred and fear. Or perhaps more accurately the hatred […]
Recently Jessica Lachenal at The Mary Sue wrote a post about what The Mary Sue means to her. She was preceded by many contributors and readers doing the same, and they talked about topics ranging from (finally) getting paid for one’s work to the importance of positive fan reaction. It […]
In December of 2013, I’d just started dating my partner. I was also working a dead-end job in an attempt to lessen the debt I was digging myself into by going to college. That job sent me to Terre Haute for a good portion of my winter break, where I […]
CW for sexual violence in this post, and some of the content may be considered NSFW. Earlier this week, Compulsion Games’ released a preview version of We Happy Few, the nightmarish dystopian game set in a drug-fueled alternate-reality 1960s England. As this game speaks to everything I love—weird visual styles, […]
This exploration of feminist games studies is a continuation—begin with part one here. Alisha: I think if we want to talk about the need for feminist games studies, we also have to take a minute to consider—briefly—the history of games studies, and maybe also the points at which feminist research […]
I’m never quite sure who decides which games should get sequels, and why. But, if you had told me three years ago that NieR: Gestalt and Replicant was going to get a sequel, my initial comment would have been someone else played that game? NieR: Gestalt and Replicant (Square Enix) […]
As most readers are no doubt aware, Pokemon Go has swept the world. Despite having a terrible interface, completely unreliable servers, no tutorial or manual, and limited creativity in gameplay, many, many people still find the game absolutely enjoyable. I myself have spent hours and hours every day since I […]
If you live in the United States, this will probably come as no shock: people are angry. People everywhere feel oppressed, targeted, slighted, and unheard. What’s particularly interesting is that people who are in power, who have always been heard, who have not been oppressed as a group are the […]
I’ve been catching up on a lot of reading this summer, and much of what I’ve been reading engages with the complexities of family structures and kinship ties. From Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina to Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, from Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats to Toni Morrison’s […]
Jean Baudrillard had a fascination with the “real.” Is Disneyland real? It’s a physical place, sure. You can pack your family up, get into a plane, land, spend your hard earned money, see princesses, go on ride. But in another sense, it is also a simulation. It is a simulation […]
Sometimes, I wonder if video games are fun anymore. It seems a kind of stupid thought, for sure. They are games, after all. And games are supposed to be fun. But I was talking to a friend about games at one point. I think we were talking about Dark Souls. […]
People all over the world love the Pokémon franchise. Fans in Hong Kong launched a protest in late May over a name change in translation. A quick image search of Pokémon tattoos reveals a treasure trove of body ink. Many people have grown up with the franchise, cutting their gaming […]
Last night I had the worst experience playing what will probably be one of the best games released this year, Inside by Playdead. For those of you who haven’t played the game yet I’ll try to be as unspoilery as possible. Inside is from Playdead, the maker of the 2010 puzzle platformer […]