For the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about female characters and when I choose to play them and when I don’t and for some reason bell hooks’ book, Outlaw Culture, has really been haunting me. The whole book is pretty amazing and was written during the […]
Monthly Archives: February 2016
22 posts
I recently started playing This War of Mine: The Little Ones, and thus far I’ve put about 5 hours into the game. My first reaction as of now: hot, boiling tears of sadness and desperation running down my face — there may have been some snot in there too. The game […]
I’ve been writing a lot the past couple weeks about metanarrativity and postmodernism, about how such things manifest themselves in games like The Magic Circle, like Until Dawn, like Pony Island. And I hope you’ll bear with me while I indulge myself in expanding on some of these ideas a […]
I actually like to stream when I play games. I do it so that I can play games with friends and strangers even when I am playing a single player game or sitting at home in my game room all by myself. So doing streaming marathons to raise money for […]
I get it. I know. You just “don’t really see a problem” with objectification of female characters. You don’t really think racial representation is an issue. You think people are just taking it all too personally. I want to talk to you about this, though, because you’re part of our […]
Episode 121: Everything Is Awful: But For Now We Fight (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). The episode in which we talk about our lives and how we see them matching up with the questionable methods of disagreement on the internet. It reminds us all […]
NYMG is by no means new to streaming on Twitch and we’re certainly not new to talking about it. (Sarah’s mentioned her own plights as a woman streaming here and Alex comments on her love for the gaming community in Twitch here); I, however, I’m just getting my feet wet. […]
Last week, I wrote about a game called Pony Island and the manner in which the game makes use of metanarrativity. And I also mentioned that my interest in such a narrative technique stems from my location as a literary studies scholar—an interest that has extended my consideration of such […]
This week, I’ve been reading Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design, a book that, in 2003, outlined some of the challenges the industry was facing in terms of expanding the market and being more welcoming to female gamers. Tracy Lien’s 2013 look at early trends in video game marketing […]
This weekend we ran our 24 hour streaming Mammothon to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. On Saturday many of our staff members and our families played a lot of games and talked about them and to our audiences for what we consider a great cause. This streaming […]
As we started our sixth year here at Not Your Mama’s Gamer, we pledged anew to do the work of social change, to work harder to take that work offline, and to pursue our Gaming for Good Initiative more aggressively. And with our pledge it seems that the universe heard […]
On Wednesday Zoë Quinn wrote a heartbreaking post about why she is giving up the fight against her ex boyfriend who has defamed her, harassed her, and made her the most hated person on the Internet. The last one isn’t true of course, but one could think it is by […]
I recently came across a game called Pony Island, and what has struck me about this game is the fact that it makes use of the idea of metanarrative in the ways it asks us to play it. And as a literary studies scholar, one whose research occasionally focuses on […]
When I was kid, my rubric for normalcy was grounded in the appearance and texture of hair. As a biracial child with an ever present African American mother and absent father and a sea of white peers, I found myself stuck in a conundrum: What am I? Searching for a […]
My great aunt was a hoarder, the stereotypical kind; had she lived another twenty years, she’d have been on a reality show for sure. Her house was a maze of pathways that wound between stacks of brittle newspapers. Anything accidentally brushed released a cloud of dust so thick it seemed […]
For months I have been waiting for the release of the little game with the cute little yarn character appropriately named Yarny. I watched video and interviews for cons, read blog posts, and I have even gone as far as making my own little Yarny figure from wire and yarn. While […]