In a recent article, “Apparent Feminism as a Methodology for Technical Communication and Rhetoric,” Erin Frost proposes a new methodology through which to understand the impact of technology and technological documentation: apparent feminism. Apparent feminism, she writes, “seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for […]
Miscellany
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“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal On the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Sunday November 20th, NYMG Writers Lee Hibbard and Jynx Boyne met at an event on Purdue University Campus. The two of them wrote reflections […]
Bianca: In light of the election, the two of us have found ourselves returning to the conversations we have had on building feminist coalitions–that is, we have found ourselves reflecting on both the consistent, perpetual need for such work and the challenges that result from embarking on such work. Previously, […]
We’ve been writing a bit about Westworld from a games studies perspective because it’s fascinating, but also because it’s a big, beautiful, visual version of so much we discuss already, and for me, with my interests in how we continue to think about the magic circle, and about player experience […]
Spoiler Alert: This article contains heavy discussion of the plot and characters of Supergiant Games’ Transistor. I should state now, as a white person who can pass very easily (despite wishing I didn’t) as a straight woman, I have a lot of privilege. I had a lot of privilege before […]
Games and Culture recently published a fascinating article,”Framing Gaming: The Effects of Media Frames on Perceptions of Game(r)s”, written by Anna Sophie Kümpel and Alexander Haas, about the influence of media portrayals of video games and gamers on beliefs about gaming. Now, it might seem like the simplest thing in the […]
Episode 140: Racism and Worldbuilding: A Conversation with Joshara Edwards (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this week’s episode we talk with Joshara Edwards. Joshara is a game developer at Blind Squirrel Games who worked on projects such as Mafia III, XCOM 2, […]
For this, the forth post in the series of posts that I have written about Mafia III and Luke Cage, I wanna play around with the notion of freedom and the ways that freedom gets enacted or enacted upon in the narrative we play. While my previous posts have used as […]
It’s election day here in the United States! Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken opens the way I open most conversations with games scholars: with a discussion of the idea of a game. What even is a game, anyway? Where she differs here from most, however, is that instead of discussing […]
To start things off, I’m going to be honest with everyone: I’m not big on sports. I wasn’t just the kid that got picked last for gym class, I was the kid who got a stomach ache so he wouldn’t have to play. I didn’t even have to fake the […]
I’ve been reading Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought, and as a result I’ve been revisiting the ways feminist science fiction and video games converse and intersect. In the past, I’ve interrogated this conversation by specifically examining the different ways motherhood is represented in feminist science fiction […]
I spend a lot of time, much more time than I should, thinking about just what games are. Not what they mean to us, though also that, but what they are, where they begin and end, and what place we the players have in considerations of games. This is a […]
It’s hard for me not to get into the Halloween spirit. In addition to being a huge fan of dressing up in costumes and consuming vast quantities of sugar, Halloween is my birthday, and that adds a whole new dimension of fun and mayhem to the holiday. My sophomore year […]
Episode 139: When Horror Gets Real: The Halloween Episode (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk about what we are playing and watching as we all hold our own private Halloween celebrations. Thinking through horror games like Night Terrors (iOS) and television […]
When I first saw the “Coming Soon” link for Ginger: Beyond the Crystal (available on Steam, XBox One, and PS4) I have to admit that I may have squealed a bit. A puzzle platformer with an adorable little blue dragon-like character. It sounded like the perfect game to play with my […]
I discovered Thumper on Steam (also available on PS4) when my friend recommended it to me last week, figuring I’d be interested in the soundtrack more than the game itself. Thumper (Drool) is based around a simple premise: ‘classic rhythm-action, blistering speed, and brutal physicality’. You play as a space beetle careening […]