In December of 2013, I’d just started dating my partner. I was also working a dead-end job in an attempt to lessen the debt I was digging myself into by going to college. That job sent me to Terre Haute for a good portion of my winter break, where I […]
Miscellany
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CW for sexual violence in this post, and some of the content may be considered NSFW. Earlier this week, Compulsion Games’ released a preview version of We Happy Few, the nightmarish dystopian game set in a drug-fueled alternate-reality 1960s England. As this game speaks to everything I love—weird visual styles, […]
The Hunt for Red Panda ($2.99) is a new mobile game from Zagrava Games. The Hunt For Red Panda goes well beyond your typical hidden object game. We want to instill in players the idea that paintings need to be appreciated and preserved for future generations — and to teach them […]
This exploration of feminist games studies is a continuation—begin with part one here. Alisha: I think if we want to talk about the need for feminist games studies, we also have to take a minute to consider—briefly—the history of games studies, and maybe also the points at which feminist research […]
I’m never quite sure who decides which games should get sequels, and why. But, if you had told me three years ago that NieR: Gestalt and Replicant was going to get a sequel, my initial comment would have been someone else played that game? NieR: Gestalt and Replicant (Square Enix) […]
As most readers are no doubt aware, Pokemon Go has swept the world. Despite having a terrible interface, completely unreliable servers, no tutorial or manual, and limited creativity in gameplay, many, many people still find the game absolutely enjoyable. I myself have spent hours and hours every day since I […]
Episode 132: Fade to White: Colorblind Racism in Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk about what role race and racism play in representation and characterization in video games. Our conversation gets deep, we talk about the foundations of […]
Bianca: A couple weeks ago, Alisha wrote about feminist game scholarship, and since then, she and I have been talking a lot (and texting a lot) about feminist theory, game studies, and the intersection of the two. That is to say, we’ve been trying to work through, together, how to […]
This week I finally finished playing Playdead’s Inside. I started playing the game at launch and had previously written about my reaction to the violence. I found the violence especially disturbing since it was directed at a child. As I was playing through the game I found myself talking through […]
If you live in the United States, this will probably come as no shock: people are angry. People everywhere feel oppressed, targeted, slighted, and unheard. What’s particularly interesting is that people who are in power, who have always been heard, who have not been oppressed as a group are the […]
I’ve been catching up on a lot of reading this summer, and much of what I’ve been reading engages with the complexities of family structures and kinship ties. From Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina to Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, from Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats to Toni Morrison’s […]
Jean Baudrillard had a fascination with the “real.” Is Disneyland real? It’s a physical place, sure. You can pack your family up, get into a plane, land, spend your hard earned money, see princesses, go on ride. But in another sense, it is also a simulation. It is a simulation […]
Pokemon Go is a lot of things. It came out Wednesday and Sam and Alisha quickly pointed out the flaws in the representation provided by the game, with good reason. In a game that was slated to let “us,” the player, be in the Pokemon world, and be the very best, […]
Episode 131: Gamer Classes and Gamer Personalities: What Kind of Gamer Are You? (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk about our own personality traits and how they align (or not) with the roles we play in games and how […]
Sometimes, I wonder if video games are fun anymore. It seems a kind of stupid thought, for sure. They are games, after all. And games are supposed to be fun. But I was talking to a friend about games at one point. I think we were talking about Dark Souls. […]
People all over the world love the Pokémon franchise. Fans in Hong Kong launched a protest in late May over a name change in translation. A quick image search of Pokémon tattoos reveals a treasure trove of body ink. Many people have grown up with the franchise, cutting their gaming […]