Episode 108: Love is a Battlefield: Games That We Love (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes or Stitcher). Tonight we just sat down and talked about some of our favorite games and why they are our favorites. It was lighthearted and fun and we hope that you […]
Samantha Blackmon
498 posts
Recently I have found myself having lots of heated discussions about racial representation in video games and the importance of paying attention to the history behind these representations (*cough* Cuphead *cough*) and in some cases it has been a bit of an uphill battle, but it’s not new. It’s the […]
In the last month or so there has been lots of discussion going on about and around the confederate flag here in the United States. Ultimately, the flag has been removed from most state government buildings and is no longer being sold in a number of big box and online […]
I spent most of last week at an annual academic games conference and have spent a lot of time processing and digesting what went on there. The thing that I love about these conferences is that I get to sit and talk (and drink beer) with other academics who often […]
Nintendo president, Satora Iwata, passed away Saturday at the age of 55. During his 2005 GDC keynote, Iwata-san said “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.” And it was the gamer in Iwata-san […]
Today we are excited to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for our new Invisibility Blues video series is going live. Through this series, Samantha and Alisha will explore race and racial representation in video games via such topics as women of color, indigenous populations, and character generation engines in games. […]
After this year’s E3 I thought that it would be fun to look back at one of my posts about last year’s E3 and the status of women in games. Last year we were talking about Aisha Tyler’s claim that female NPCs in games increased diversity in games and Anita […]
This year the 4th of July feels more distant than others for a number of reasons. Several weeks ago on June 19th we celebrated 150 years of emancipation with Juneteenth (which happened for slaves in 1865, not 1776), Black churches are burning in the South, and unarmed Black children, women, […]
It’s that time of year again, the time when all of the academic conferences and game and comic cons start to bump up against one another and cry out for my limited attention (and cash). It’s this time of year when I really feel the liminality of the space that […]
When Bethesda made the E3 announcement that they were going to be releasing a mobile Fallout game I was more than a little bit excited. I have been playing Fallout Shelter (iOS) almost constantly since it launched. I started with just one vault and thought that I might get that one […]
Because of the woefully bad performance of the PC version of the final installment of the Batman trilogy, Batman Arkham Knight, WB has suspended sales of the game for PC until such time that they can patch the game to a playable point. WB representatives on the game’s official forum […]
We joked several times on the last episode of the podcast that this was going to be the year of the 4 at E3. We were all anticipating 2nds, 3rds, or 4ths of some series or another and that held up for the most part. One of the things that […]
My post today comes from the conversations that have been happening around games for years, but have come to the fore again in the last couple of weeks with all of the discussion of representations of race (or a lack thereof) in CD Project Red’s The Witcher 3. We have […]
As a kid I was always a huge fan of X-Men, Spiderman, and Fantastic Four comics so it really only makes sense that my own kid would enjoy some of the same things in her own comic world. She snuggles up with her own stuffed Spiderman, Hulk, and Wolverine dolls every […]
I have been anxious to see Splatoon up close and personal since it was first announced in a Nintendo Direct conference. First off the game was going to release with amiibo. Little Inkling amiibo with funky little hairdos and super soaker type paint sprayers. And if the collectible gods smiled down on […]
I get a lot of people asking me how the writing that I do here on the site connects back to the academic writing that is expected in the job that I do that keeps the lights on around here. Well, today I presented a piece (along with Alex Layne […]