As the semester ended, I spent a little time with Crusader Kings II again, as I often do when I have some free time at last. I sink in for a few days and decompress, and then I ignore the game for months. But this time, as I played, I […]
Miscellany
1089 posts
This is a post about board games, but I do spend a little time contextualizing it so you can stick with the personal anecdote or jump straight down to the review bits. All games discussed in this post were purchased by me for personal use. When I first decided homeschooling […]
In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time considering so-called “walking simulators,” first as I dug into different definitions of games, and then, as I moved away from that, into perceptions of games and the experiences they offer. One of the games that comes up most often […]
Episode 151: Coming Together Over Streams: A Conversation with Justin Clark (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week in the podcast we are joined by Twitch streamer Justin Clark (Twitch & Twitter: TrueZeldaFan) as we talk about the culture of streaming, why he […]
I’d like to pick up a small part of last week’s discussion on games, narratives, and experience, as the idea of environmental narrative bled into my seminar papers this semester as well. If we want to think about games as a matter of being – as in, what happens when we […]
Last weekend I finally made it to the theater (with Alisha–she was brave) to see Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). I’ve wanted to see it for a while, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to see the film alone. Miraculously I had avoided spoilers in the […]
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
Episode 150: On Recognition, Representation, and Revolution: A Conversation with TreaAndrea Russworm (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week in the podcast we had an amazing conversation with TreaAndrea Russworm (@ProfessorTMR) is an associate professor at UMass Amhearst, author of Blackness is Burning: […]
The Sexy Brutale is a puzzle adventure game from Tequila Works (2017) and is available on Xbox One, PS4, and Steam. It only seemed fitting that the kids were fascinated with the idea of playing Clue during the same week that I was set to play The Sexy Brutale (Xbox One) […]
Last week, Austin Walker wrote about endings over at Waypoint, focusing not only on literal game endings, but also on letting go. Preparing to return to the world can be a challenge, certainly; I’ve never come back from Trumbull Valley, for instance. But sometimes it’s all too easy to leave […]
I have to admit that in the last year or so I have played several games that have really made me question the existence of a time sucking black hole…but not in a bad way. These games have made me lose track of time as I got sucked into their […]
I spent a lot of time looking at diversity in State of Decay and its re-release, from actually counting and coding bodies to considering the feeling of a game driven by the kinds of characters who don’t normally lead stories. Results were mixed; the game, while much stronger than many […]
Trigger Warning: Mentions of Rape, Sexual Assault During my last year of college, I took a film course while getting my English minor. The course itself was pretty fun: an in depth analysis of “bad” film and what made it so bad. The instructor, however, was horrible. While I have […]
It is no small secret that television isn’t really my thing. I watch a couple of choice (my choice and likely no one else’s) shows and that’s about it. I subscribe to HBO Now for the duration of the Game of Thrones season, I wait anxiously for new Marvel series […]
We got an e-mail last week about good games with troubling elements — so, basically, all games. But the question was: how do we choose the right way to handle games with problems? We have to play the games to understand them, and we want to support devs who are […]
A few months ago, I wrote a couple posts connecting feminist science fiction and feminist SF criticism to the field of feminist game studies as a way of thinking through the ways feminist game studies might draw from the practices enacted in the field of feminist science fiction in order […]