Exploratory adventure games, narrative adventures, spatial adventures, environmental adventures, narrative explorations—different, certainly related phrases, all used to describe games that rely heavily on exploration to craft an experiential story. Walking simulators often overlap heavily here, but with games like Her Story, for instance, there’s not much (or any!) walking, so we needed […]
Miscellany
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In a recent Games and Culture article, “’I can Defend Myself’: Women’s Strategies for Coping with Harassment While Gaming Online,” author Amanda Cote presents research and interview data collected to show how women and other targeted groups deal with constant online harassment. She found five main ways women cope: “These […]
Episode 146: Sometimes We Play Games on Boards (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this week’s episode we talk about board games with our guest Tony Bushner. There’s also lots of talk of TCGs and Hearthstone because that is how we roll sometimes. […]
8days-Peace is our Business (not to be confused with the title 8 Days, the canceled PS3 game). is a dual-stick 8 bit shooter by Santa Clara Games. It released in 2015 for the PC and was ported to the PS4 and XBox One February 7 of this year. The copy […]
Reigns, released late last summer, situates the player as king of an ancient kingdom, located somewhere faintly European, somewhere in the early 7th century. But you’re not one king; you are all kings, a long-reaching dynasty of king after king, each taking up the crown upon his predecessor’s fall. The […]
I’ve always been a sucker for worldbuilding. One of the reasons I play tabletop games like D&D is the opportunity for intense integration of history, legend, and lore, and most of my favorite video games have similar functions. Whether it’s reading up on the extensive codices found in the Mass […]
This week many (privileged) folks hit social media all aghast that Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced under Rule XIX which stipulates that “no Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming […]
For the past few semesters, I’ve been playing text adventures once or twice with my students (9:05 and Zork). For most the format is completely unfamiliar—typically, I have one or two students who’ve at least heard of text-based games—and they struggle with the step-by-step commands. Look. Open. Take. Read. It’s […]
I’ve written about my old undergraduate pastime of playing Dungeons and Dragons before, though working towards a PhD has made time a precious commodity I can rarely spend on social gaming. I did get the chance to do a little tabletop gaming over winter break, and, as it always does, […]
In her post this week, Alisha discussed both the challenges of and need for feminist writing that examines, as she puts it, our “world of games.” Her discussion of these things brought to mind, for me, a book I’ve been reading this week—namely, Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies […]
Episode 145: Sometimes You Have to Kill Things: On Games and Self-Care (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this week’s episode we talk about games and self-care. We spend some time talking about the games we play to soothe our souls. We welcome […]
You get what you deserve. There’s a song about it. It’s used over and over in conversation when delighting in the downfall of one’s enemy. Motivational speakers use the saying to try and help audience members buy into whatever program they’re selling. It seems like such a simple concept. It […]
So my gaming has been quelled a bit by a freak accident. I somehow managed to take a sizable chunk of my thumb out with a bottle opener. I will spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that even the ER nurse was impressed by my incredible […]
This week, I was re-reading Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perception,” and I had one of those revelatory moments that come only when you’ve read something a million times already, when you have absorbed and understood it and are free to […]
I’ve always appreciated games that operate under a simple premise. Anything that involves solving a puzzle or accomplishing a simple task appeals to the part of my brain that was solidly addicted to playing Tetris on my Gameboy Pocket when I was ten, always striving to reach the next level, […]
The word phenomena is one I’ve been coming across a lot the past few weeks. In “Virtual Bodies in Virtual Worlds: A Phenomenology of Play in Video Games,” Benjamin Gattet, for one, applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of phenomena to “the experience of playing a video game” through the use of […]