Note: I received a free review code for this game. But my review is not indebted to the company, nor is it influenced by it in any way. This game is on iOS for $4.99 As soon as I saw a review code for this iPad game come across our […]
Monthly Archives: August 2016
20 posts
There are lots of really cool board games available for children outside of the run of the mill Candy Land, Game of Life, and the like. In the last couple of years I have discovered more kid friendly versions of adult board games like Catan Junior, My First Carcassonne, and […]
Dex, a Kickstarter-funded 2D sidescroller cyberpunk RPG (that’s a mouthful) originally available in early access in 2014 recently hacked its way onto consoles, with PS4 and Xbox One releases this summer. As a fan of cyberpunk worlds, choice-based games, and running in profile down long hallways, I figured I’d give […]
This week has been a bit of a family gaming challenge. While I have wanted to do nothing more than play No Man’s Sky in my now limited, school-started-back-this-week, gaming time, my daughter has wanted to play Minecraft every chance she’s gotten. And it’s understandable in many ways, both games […]
CW: Rape, Harassment, Threats About a month ago, LEGO released the new Ghostbusters Ecto 1 & 2 set, which included the new female characters. On that day, someone from Reddit posted a picture of his or her 6-year-old daughter excitedly holding her new set. If I recall correctly, the set […]
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 […]
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 […]
On the way to the (final!) Games+Learning+Society conference last week, my friend and co-presenter Tony and I were talking about hard games, and failure. We focused on how games were organized during the arcade era, around the lives bought with a quarter and how this helped shape not only games, […]
Episode 134: Hauntings: A Conversation with The Deep End Games’ Amanda Gardner (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk with writer, producer, and co-founder of The Deep End Games, Amanda Gardner about their upcoming horror game, Perception. We had a […]
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 […]
Later this week, I’ll also be at Games+Learning+Society with Alex and Kishonna, presenting a Well Played of my own on State of Decay. I’ve been such a strong advocate for the game through two releases (and DLC), but here I’ll finally be able to draw the various themes and lines of inquiry I’ve […]
One of the things that my daughter and I have done since she was old enough to pick in a high chair at the table with me and wield a kid sized knife is cook together. When she was little more than a toddler “cooking” looked a lot like mushing […]
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 […]
This year at the Games+Learning+Society conference, I’ll be presenting with my friend and colleague Cody for the Well Played series. Our presentation, titled “Just Give me the Controller: Scaffolded Learning, World Building, and the Witness,” will focus on how the game The Witness is able to create an environment that […]
In response to a 2014 essay in First Person Scholar by Miguel Penabella, Jim Gee said, “For me, what makes a video game good is a loving marriage between game mechanics and content,” a simple statement that feels like a summary of much of the ludic theory we work with […]
Episode 133: On Toxic Activism with Gil Almogi: Ignore the Trolls and Focus on the Systems (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk with freelance games writer Gil Almogi (@gilmeansjoy) about games, social media, and the work of activism. Gil […]