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 […]
Alisha Karabinus
185 posts
Not long ago, I wrote about looking at some of the studies on how men see women (and vice versa, and how we see our own genders) from a game design angle. Studying what eye trackers reveal about how we look at bodies can tell us a lot about media, […]
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, […]
Recently, Blizzard announced the implementation of a new policy for World of Warcraft,: players who are frequently reported for spamming and/or abusive chat will receive a 24-hour warning silence, preventing them from using a number of in-game functions. Players who are continually reported after that warning may be permanently silenced. […]
Here’s a question I’ve seen time and again, asked of more mainstream individuals like Anita Sarkeesian, or whenever a new article, study, or book crops up: why are so many feminist academics interested in video games all of a sudden? Unpacking this question means separating the threads and assumptions: first, […]
I haven’t played an MMORPG since 2010, when I allowed my World of Warcraft account to lapse, or at least I hadn’t until recently, when I had to spend a week playing for a class. Rather than start a new account, I picked up the subscription where I’d left off, […]
Barbie’s new career was announced earlier this year, and now the new doll has been released: Game Developer Barbie, a doll whose price shot up almost immediately (what was initially available for $13 is now a hundred or more). While the doll is only available in white skin (for now? […]
If last year’s E3 was all about the women, this year’s is all about the undead hordes, with announcements about the next season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, a sequel to NYMG-beloved State of Decay, a Dead Rising 4 that looks like it’s getting back to the franchise’s roots, and […]
Over the past few years, surveys conducted by IGDA have revealed a rising number of female game developers. Since 2009, the number of female developers has doubled, but women still only represent approximately 22% of game designers, woefully low numbers compared to data that indicates women make up half the […]
This summer, I’m in a class focused on women in games, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: one step forward, 97,000 steps back at every turn. The success stories—of games, characters, girl gaming clubs, industry professionals, more—are both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because we’re starved for them; terrible because those […]
It takes a special kind of determination to take on games like checkers, Go, and chess, games that are such solid pillars of life that they simply are, but here comes Tak, aiming to do just that very thing: enter the realm of abstract strategy, with a long historical narrative […]
Lately I’ve been wondering just what game culture is anymore. I’m a member of a number of gaming groups in my professional life, in my hobbies, and across the Internet, and conversations are never just restricted to games. In generally feminist/gamer spaces, conversations skew all over the place; in our […]
I’ve been busy lately, moving and working, and because of that, I haven’t had much time to play. So instead of sitting down to something longer, I’ve been trying out free-to-play games on Steam, playing two new releases in the last week and poking at a few others. The first, The […]
This semester, I’ve been working as much on game creation as on games criticism and exploration. I’m working on three different projects, one with a larger team and two others with fellow NYMG contributor Ashley, and while I’ve worked on a few small efforts from time to time in the […]
A few days ago, a user posted in the Overwatch Beta feedback section of the Blizzard forums that they were uncertain about one of Tracer’s victory poses in the game, a version of the infamous butt pose. User Fipps didn’t seem to have an issue with other characters who posed […]
Recently, I wrote about the presentation of illness and injury in The Flame in the Flood, and as I’ve played more of that game, I found myself thinking about the visuals of effort. In some games, you can run forever, no matter how many dozens of pounds of gear you’re […]