The advertisements that appear on the sidebars of Facebook pages are creepy. It’s true for a number of reasons. For instance I’ve heard stories passed around of people – specifically “edgy” looking girls – who have posted pictures on their personal social media pages only to have their faces wind […]
Sarah Nixon
99 posts
In the opening cinematic of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, the titular character Claire “Lightning” Farron stands atop a clock tower, the glow of a fantastical city below her. She dramatically removes the sunglasses off her face, announcing her return not only to the fictional world that has progressed 500 […]
Trigger Warning: the game about to be described (The Day the Laughter Stopped) and the content of this article discusses and addresses rape and sexual assault An interactive fiction game – although in truth it more closely resembles an interactive narrative/fiction experience than what I’d personally define as a game […]
This past weekend during the Super Bowl thousands took to Twitter to address their concerns over representation in advertisements during the various commercial breaks that are arguably as watched as the game itself. Each tweet called out various offenses that a number of companies were guilty of – lack of […]
Games scholar James Paul Gee introduces the idea of an intersection between identity and learning in his book entitled What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, through which he infers that video games are particularly able to encourage the player to assume the identities and mindsets […]
American McGee has added another game to his portfolio of delightfully twisted fairy tales in Grimm, an episodic series recently debuted on Steam. The game is split into twenty-three individual parts. Each edition follows a traditional story from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the first of which is currently available for free […]
A video released the other day for the upcoming The Last of Us DLC gave an encouraging glimpse into something that I have come to realize is sorely lacking from video games: female friendships. In the clip Riley (who I was excited to see is a person of color), who […]
When the new year dawned after the close of another, I found myself curious regarding the quality of media representation for the year. As I set forth to do a little bit of investigative research I found that there are a decent amount of statistics for female representation in blockbuster […]
This just in: girls aren’t supposed to like things originally meant for boys, or at least not according to recent decisions perpetrated by executives and developers. Girls are not an “appropriate” audience for boys’ things. This revelation comes after executives at Warner Brothers canceled the Young Justice cartoon after the […]
**Trigger warning: suicide, violence** Thanks for nothing, goodbye. Unlike the haunting message that introduces the tone of The Cat Lady, a side-scrolling horror game developed by the UK based company Harvester Games, even what small portion I have played thus far proves that this statement certainly doesn’t describe this narrative-driven […]
This past Saturday Spike TV sponsored the 2013 Video Game Awards which is now rather inexplicably branded as the VGX Awards because everyone knows adding an “X” to the end of things instantly makes them cooler and more extreme and not at all gives an impression that an eleven year […]
The more active I’ve become in both the so-called “social justice” and feminist gaming communities the more I’ve grown to resent being told and seeing others be told to be more “nice” about things. Perhaps even worse than the direct and obviously aggressive responses or hate messages are those littered […]
I’m not going to beat around the bush: I’m pretty disillusioned and frustrated with the portrayal of the Thanksgiving holiday, something that I believe many of my co-bloggers would also attest to. It’s not that I hate the message of the holiday; encouraging loved ones to spend time together and […]
I have a confession: sometimes I like to experience games without necessarily ever playing them. In other words, I dabble in vicarious play. Whether it’s because of a lack of money or other demands for my time, I occasionally find myself turning to the internet to watch playthroughs. I pick […]
Pink hair, frills, magical girl powers and lots and lots of death; this is certainly how I would describe Long Live the Queen, a visual novel role-playing game created by Hanako Games. Originally debuted last year, it was only recently released on Steam to a larger public as a result […]
With the increase of video game consumers and gamers ever on the rise and the console war between the upcoming Xbox One and Playstation 4 rising to its peak, it’s really no surprise we’ve also been seeing an increase of game or gaming related advertisements on the television between our […]