In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart addresses issues of moral and ethical choices and how games designed in such a way to draw players into ethical dilemmas, moral reflection, and immersive experiences. This War of Mine: The Little Ones (TWoM), by placing the player into unfamiliar territory and in an unfamiliar role, crafts […]
Miscellany
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Recently I had to explain slut shaming to my 7 year old daughter. Not in those terms, but for the usual reasons. While traumatized by the whole event (me, not her) I did take some pride in the fact that it was not her doing the shaming, but other little […]
A new Tropes vs. Women in Video Games episode came out earlier this month, this one specifically on body language and the male gaze. In this episode, Sarkeesian focuses especially on the notion of movement as something that “can be a powerful thing” because movement can sometimes “tell us the most […]
Last Friday, Alex Layne explored legal definitions of terrorism, stalking, and cyberbullying to draw some conclusions about cyberterrorist acts, specifically in terms of online harassment against women tagged as “social justice warriors” by the GamerGate movement. Alex’s piece ignited a firestorm on Twitter, with responses ranging from mockery and downplay […]
This semester, I’ve been working as much on game creation as on games criticism and exploration. I’m working on three different projects, one with a larger team and two others with fellow NYMG contributor Ashley, and while I’ve worked on a few small efforts from time to time in the […]
I set the controller down and looked at my computer screen. Up to this point in Undertale, there had been hints that the character –the one I named Chara–was referred to with neutral pronouns. But I didn’t think it would carry. And yet, here we were. A direct character interaction. […]
Episode 124: Alison Rapp, Nintendo, and the Future of the Games Industry (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk amongst ourselves about Nintendo’s termination of Alison Rapp, online harassment, and the future of feminism in and around the games industry. Grab a drink […]
As we prepare to write this, we sit in silence, simultaneously furious and sad. Sad because a woman we would like to call a comrade-in-arms has met with a huge injustice and furious because we live and work in a community that not only makes that kind of injustice possible, […]
A few days ago, a user posted in the Overwatch Beta feedback section of the Blizzard forums that they were uncertain about one of Tracer’s victory poses in the game, a version of the infamous butt pose. User Fipps didn’t seem to have an issue with other characters who posed […]
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 […]
As a mother, a gamer, and a change agent I am starting to find myself more and more in the position of having to explain why we don’t do certain things that other people do. When my daughter was an infant I made the decision that Disney princesses would not […]
Recently, I wrote about the presentation of illness and injury in The Flame in the Flood, and as I’ve played more of that game, I found myself thinking about the visuals of effort. In some games, you can run forever, no matter how many dozens of pounds of gear you’re […]
After completing NBA 2K’s Living Da Dream, I was left only with feelings of wishful thinking: wishing that gaming would allow characters of color to exist in a fantasy world of possibilities. Instead, we were once again handed a series of tropes, stereotypes, respectability politics, and essentialist assumptions about Black […]
Episode 122: Where the River Takes Us: A Conversation with Gwen Frey of The Molasses Flood (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with Gwen Frey from The Molasses Flood the developers of the new indie survival roguelike (yeah, that’s all kinds […]
I recently came across an article entitled “Between the Lines: Games and Diegesis,” in which Ian McCamant interrogates the manner in which games tell stories and the manner in which they tell stories differently than literature or film. And since these are subjects I usually find myself engaging with, McCamant’s […]
Story Time: I sit, staring at the intro screen to, of all things, Pokemon Y. I’ve been here for maybe 10 minutes, staring at a very simple question that Professor Sycamore asked, that every Professor of Pokemon Studies always asks right at the beginning of the game. “Are you a […]