This semester I am teaching a game studies course that I think may be one of the best courses that I have ever taught. The course is called “Women and Games” and it is a cross-listed undergraduate-graduate course. Over the course of the last couple of years as we have […]
Games and Education
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Episode 128: Never Alone and the Gifts of Our Ancestors: A Conversation with Amy Fredeen (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). Last night we were privileged (nay blessed) to have a conversation Amy Fredeen of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC). Amy is the Executive Vice […]
Episode 127: Brains and Games: A Chat Deborah Budding on Neurodiversity and Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with Deborah Budding (@Nebula63), neuropsychologist and podcaster at neurocurious.org This week we talk about neurodiversity, brains, and games. We also about environmental, social, […]
I sit here today wrestling with this question for a very good reason. A summer camp I’ve been involved in is on the precipice of being shut down. The camp is designed to get middle and high school aged girls involved in IT, computer science, and video games. Last year […]
So this week I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diversity and the insidious nature of racism. More specifically I’ve been looking at and thinking about something that gets called by Claude M. Steele, in Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, a stereotype threat. According to […]
I’m currently writing my dissertation, a process that is simultaneously going better and worse than I anticipated. Writing the dissertation, it seems, brings a lot of my anxieties to the forefront. Finishing the dissertation is symbolic of leaving my program and community, leaving grad school (and my identity as a […]
In academia, there are constant fights about disciplinary boundaries: you can’t teach ethics in a course: that belongs to philosophy; you can’t say the word history in a course description; you can’t touch certain authors. Disciplinary boundaries can be a good thing: they let scholars know they have a home; […]
As promised, my ESL composition class played A Bird Story and it’s been a wonderful and insightful experience reading their reactions to a game they’ve deemed as unworthy of “gaming” status (I’ll touch on this a bit below); they didn’t anticipate that I would, however, expect this reaction from them regarding a […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about my transition to Games Studies this last semester and the role it plays (and will play) in my research as a Second Language Studies student; I’ve also been pondering on the role of intersectionality lately, specifically how Latoya Peterson admonishes in her article, Intersectionality […]
We often, or at least I, think of constructing and sharing stories in the form of talking over dinner and a glass of wine, or on the front porch during a fall sunset just as the fireflies begin sprinkling out; stories are generally thought to be read in books where […]
I write and talk and think a lot about gender representation in toys, games, and just in general media and the world around me. My aim and hope is to show the places where gender representation is missing or problematic. When I think about girls having access to and playing […]
As I launch a new game studies program, I am becoming keenly aware of issues that crop up when you bring games and concepts from game studies into an undergraduate classroom. When I was a graduate student, surrounded by professors and graduate students, I almost never had to argue about […]
Episode 110: Back to School Special: Learning With, Through, and Around Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). With school starting recently for all of us, we’ve been thinking a lot about games as educational spaces. In this episode we talk about lots […]
TW: I’m going to go ahead and tag this one for racism and racist imagery. This week a little bit of hell broke loose in the serious games space that quickly circulated to the mainstream. Serious Games Interactive tweeted about a game that they were playing, Playing History 2: Slave […]
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 […]
Recently there have been a couple of different articles that have addressed the way that girls and women interact with technology and how their experiences are affected by their interactions in games (via voice chat) or the ways that they perceive or are perceived by the community. As the mother […]