I’ve been thinking a lot about The Flame in the Flood lately; I’m playing it, my husband’s playing it, even my son played a time or two. We’re all big fans of survival games, and roguelikes; we all love scrabbling to survive another adventure, another day, and the chipper, folksy music, […]
Alisha Karabinus
185 posts
Episode 122: “We Got You A Pony!”: A Conversation with Lauren Stone and Travis Stout (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we return to Trumbull Valley for more discussions with folks from behind the scenes on State of Decay, the game that […]
Michonne is my favorite character in The Walking Dead universe, in both the show and the comic, so when word came down that she was the first of the characters to get her own Telltale outing, I was thrilled (other comic characters have shown up, but never served as the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Minecraft: cultural phenomenon, powerhouse in online gaming, bedrock of young gamers’ experience and learning, and now, a hotbed of abuse and playground for predators, according to a recent piece on Motherboard by Matthew Broomfield. Broomfield details the exploits of YouTuber LionMaker, who was, and is, befriending and exploiting children as young […]
Last night I found myself browsing Steam demos, as I often do. Every couple of months I’ll find one or two that catch my eye, but more often than not, I scroll through the list and discover there’s nothing that particularly sparks my interest. More exciting is the occasional demo I get […]
Recently, as I re-read Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design, I kept thinking about the differences between the games Koster was using as examples and the games I’ve most often been writing about lately, the indies and the so-called walking simulators, games that often have low levels […]
When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s […]
Warning: MGSV spoilers, discussions of sexual violence and war within. Metal Gear is and has always been a weird beast. Sometimes the good guys are bad guys are good guys on the side and sometimes they’re all clones and have maybe exchanged a body part or two. In this universe, […]
Oh, December. That most wonderful time of the year, when everyone argues about holiday greetings, politics, and whether or not this terrible weather is really just some career-risking global conspiracy designed to piss off people who really like plastic. Oh, and also, everyone with a website or a YouTube channel that mentioned […]
On any given day, a good 1-2% of my Facebook feed is cats, but lately, it’s been a very specific sort of cats: virtual cats, the fuzzy furballs of Neko Atsume. We’re wrapping up finals week here at the university, and many of the grad students had papers due over […]
Since playing The Beginner’s Guide, I’ve continued to wrestle with the various definitions and boundaries of just what a game is, considering the ever-expanding sphere. Even if I think only of recent releases, there are games without fail states, like Submerged, and that also have no real win conditions, like Her […]
I’ve been chatting with a friend about Metal Gear Solid V and the art of the sneak recently, and it made me think a little differently about what I wrote regarding combat avoidance back in the summer. We were talking about stealth first as a puzzle — discussing MGSV and […]
Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn is often mentioned as playing on a number of horror tropes. Everyone can survive (depending), the two sex-craziest teens may have a real heart-to-heart about vulnerability (maybe), the ostensible Final Girl could meet her maker while others survive (possibly), and the black guy might make it (if […]