While I have spent the last three decades of my life being as politically active as was feasible at any given time and being as verbal about said politics as I could, I have to admit that doing the same with my work as a games scholar has not been […]
Samantha Blackmon
498 posts
I have spent a lot of my last 40 years playing adventure games. Text based adventure games, monochromatic adventure games with crazy little pixelated figures that “moved” from screen to screen along with the story, 8-bit, 16-bit, cel shaded, PC, console, mobile…you name it. Lots of them. More of them […]
Episode 101: Rage On Fleek: On Choice Feminism and Diverse Identities (Right click and save as to download, or hit us up on iTunes or Stitcher) The episode where we talk about “Choice Feminism” and how we understand what it means and what the implications of it are. Discussions of the […]
With summer break looming and with my daughter’s (Pea) recent discovery of Stampy Cat’s Terraria Let’s Plays (thanks to the research that I was doing for an earlier NYMG piece) there has been a lot of Terraria going on in my house. Oddly enough very little playing of the game has […]
It’s early in the morning and I have yet to have coffee, but I promise I’m not crazy. I know that I have never been a fan of gamification (and I can promise that this isn’t a post about gamification itself, though we’ve done that a lot in the past) […]
100 episodes and four and a half years and last weekend was a damned near perfect way to commemorate it. We all got together and played video games and just chatted and then followed that up with an awesome conversation about video games, tech, and feminism with Brianna Wu of Giant […]
The winner of the State of Decay YOSE Giveaway is Nate Kiernan (@MrNinjaSquirrel), who also runs his own games review site, Kritiqal. Maybe we’ll see a review of State of Decay YOSE there soon as well! Congrats, Nate, and have fun slaying some zombies!
Would you like to win your own copy of Undead Labs’ State of Decay YOSE, the game that Alisha has been evangelizing for the last few weeks? Here’s your chance! Follow us on Twitter, tweet about the giveaway, or (for the most entries) rate and review us on iTunes or […]
I’m not one to believe that gaming is a metaphor for life, but sometimes there are some truly uncanny moments and I had one of those this week. Recently my 6 year old started playing Pokemon Y on her own 3DS (she “played” X with me on mine when it […]
While the rest of us were enjoying TableTop Day this weekend in the privacy of our own homes (or in public if we so chose), Anita Sarkeesian was at a Columbus, OH game parlor having her photograph taken without her permission and posted (and RT’ed) on Twitter. This is problematic […]
Not all disabilities are visible. Not even the physical ones. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t affect the ways that we interact with technologies. I know that Alisha and I suffer with some pretty nasty RSIs (repetitive stress injuries) and I have some pretty significant hearing loss in one […]
Recently I was asked by a group of graduate students (not my own) why I do games research. It’s a question that I get frequently and the answer is not usually what people expect. Or at least not fully so. They expect me to tell them how I see my […]
This week the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has decided that once a publisher stops supporting a game doing anything to restore it to functionality is the equivalent of hacking or piracy. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has responded by asking the U.S. Copyright Office to make special exceptions for museums, […]
I remember when Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures first launched. Pea was about 3 1/2 and really liked video games (still does for the record), but still spent most of her time demanding that I play the games that she wanted to watch. When she asked for Skylanders I was a little skeptical. […]
The first video in Sarkeesian’s new video series, Positive Female Characters in Video Games, launched yesterday. In this video she covers the Scythian from Sword & Sworcery. While there are bound to be some growing pains as she begins this new series, Sarkeesian does a solid analysis of the game’s […]
One of the many things that we talked about in episode 97 of the podcast (it’s a good one and you should go back and listen to it right after you finish reading this post) was the incredible lack of diversity among the popular Twitch streamers and YouTubers. While there […]