The following is a rough timeline of sexist incidents in the gaming sphere since the 1980s, including releases of notable (and notorious) titles, issues within and around studios, developers, and other professionals, and cultural events. It isn’t a “complete” timeline because no timeline can be complete; some incidents have been […]
Alisha Karabinus
185 posts
This weekend, several NYMG staffers (and friends!) are gearing up for the 2015 Extra Life marathon, a 24-hour frenzy of gaming for charity. We will be hosting streams from several of our members on the official NYMG Twitch channel, but below we have listed individual channels along with a preview […]
Not long ago, I started playing State of Decay again. I know, I know, but at this point, it’s become a comfort object for me, something to help me relax during a busy week. I started a new Breakdown game and fiddled a little with Lifeline again, and looking at […]
This week I played The Beginner’s Guide, the latest effort from Davey Wreden, creator of the much-lauded The Stanley Parable. The Beginner’s Guide, much like that game, is a short experience, built in Source, and as The Stanley Parable is a commentary on agency and game design, The Beginner’s Guide […]
(No direct spoilers here for episode five, but instead just general discussion of narrative structure and larger considerations of the game as a whole.) Since the release of the first episode, my experience with Life Is Strange has been a series of ups and downs, but as the story has come […]
Recently, I played through Kiva Bay’s game 12hrs, a game in which players are thrust into the role of a homeless woman trying to survive the night. Suffice to say, 12hrs is a harrowing experience in general, but unusually so here because I initially played as part of a group. […]
No Man’s Sky, the procedurally generated universe-exploring created by the small team at Hello Games, may have made a splash at this year’s E3, but last night’s demo on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert launched the game into a whole new dimension. Hello Games’ co-founder Sean Murray seemed in his […]
Since we’ve been discussing Her Story again lately, I went back and replayed the beginning. The game initially seeds the player with four videos tagged with the keyword “murder,” and since the gameplay is built solely from searching keywords, I catalogued all the major options in these early videos, omitting articles and […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Western approach to menstruation and how it factors into constructions of the ideas of (cis) womanhood, so it seemed like a happy bit of synchronicity when the Lammily doll’s new accessory popped up on my social […]
It seems strange that Shadowrun is only just over twenty-five years old; for me, Shadowrun, that dour, gritty marriage of cyberpunk and fantasy that so made William Gibson roll his eyes, feels eternal. I feel like the landscape has been littered with books and games in the Shadowrun universe for […]
Spoilers abound; content warnings as well for sexual violence and torture. There’s been a lot of discussion about the “male gaze” around Quiet, the mute female sniper in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and it’s a phrase we’ve employed here a number of times in talking about video […]
Be warned: spoilers for all seasons of The Walking Dead, the episodes of Fear the Walking Dead, and the comics through current continuity follow. Two weeks into the new spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, a familiar refrain can be heard: the show is killing off all its Black male characters, a complaint […]
This semester, I’m trying a few different things in the classroom. I’m teaching in, and doing curriculum development for, a specialized program in conjunction with our college of tech, so this fall is all about (reasoned) experimentation. All the first-year writing students in this program are tech students who are all enrolled […]
Last week, I rushed home to Arkansas because my mother was having surgery to remove tumors that had been discovered on her right ovary. Her tests came back with cancer markers, and the mass was growing so rapidly, nearly doubling in size in a matter of days, so we all […]
Ever since Bulimia.com released their re-imagined takes on female video game characters, there has been a great deal of debate as to whether or not the redone bodies actually were more “realistic” as stated. From the original explanation for the project: Some gaming studios boast their hyper-realistic lighting techniques, touting […]
As we move into August and the anniversary of #GamerGate’s beginnings, I’ve been thinking through a lot of the discussions around gaming, and gaming identity, over the past year. It’s not a new topic for me; I’ve written about what it means to be a gamer often, both recently and […]