When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s […]
Miscellany
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Social media has been employed as a significant site of mobilizing for Black Lives Matter especially with the power of Black Twitter. This form of “social public” as Andre Brock outlines allows users to generate culturally relevant content and disseminate it to their audience. And that scope is beyond the […]
Warning: MGSV spoilers, discussions of sexual violence and war within. Metal Gear is and has always been a weird beast. Sometimes the good guys are bad guys are good guys on the side and sometimes they’re all clones and have maybe exchanged a body part or two. In this universe, […]
This holiday season, with the release of Star Wars, I found myself thinking a lot about fandom and how our love of various things (games, LEGO, movie franchises, etc.) becomes part of our conversations in both real life and on the internet. I’m not a fan of Star Wars. I […]
Episode 118: Who Gets to Be a Gamer?: A Conversation with Latoya Peterson (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk to the fabulous Latoya Peterson, creator of Fusion’s Girl Gamer documentary. A rousing conversation about gaming as women, online games community, […]
I took a feminist methodologies class this past semester, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make use of feminist methodologies in my own work and my own research on games and literature. What seems important when conceptualizing of such thinking and practice is that there […]
Immediately after finals last week, in preparation for traveling down South to meet my partner’s parents, cousins, sister, aunts, uncles (basically all of Texas), I began a hunt for games I could play on my iPad and on Steam – especially since bringing my Xbox One with me wasn’t exactly […]
With Winter Break upon us I see more frantic pleas from parents asking for ideas of what to do with their children while they are home for 2 whole weeks. And I understand, there are only so many trampoline parks and rock climbing walls you want to see (or pay […]
Oh, December. That most wonderful time of the year, when everyone argues about holiday greetings, politics, and whether or not this terrible weather is really just some career-risking global conspiracy designed to piss off people who really like plastic. Oh, and also, everyone with a website or a YouTube channel that mentioned […]
This fall I was pulled into watching the Netflix original series, Master of None starring Aziz Ansari, with the promise of diversity and feminist thought. Being a little outside of what I see as the shows intended demographic (but I basically play games for a living so what the hell, […]
On any given day, a good 1-2% of my Facebook feed is cats, but lately, it’s been a very specific sort of cats: virtual cats, the fuzzy furballs of Neko Atsume. We’re wrapping up finals week here at the university, and many of the grad students had papers due over […]
After my Ode to Lara’s Thigh Gap, I started pondering on why a critical evaluation of female body types in video games is important for consideration in the first place. In other words, why were some people vehemently in support of my perspective while others cheered me on? It was […]
Episode 117: Lost in Liminal Space: A Chat with Melissa Bianchi (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk to Melissa Bianchi from University of Florida about her research . We talk about things from liminal space to animal studies. Games That […]
Since playing The Beginner’s Guide, I’ve continued to wrestle with the various definitions and boundaries of just what a game is, considering the ever-expanding sphere. Even if I think only of recent releases, there are games without fail states, like Submerged, and that also have no real win conditions, like Her […]
Last week Naughty Dog gave us a new glimpse at Uncharted 4 and we got to see Nadine Ross. Nadine looked like a kick ass Black female character who was clearly taking no shit from Nathan Drake. Some people were excited, some were skeptical about the possibility of another aggressive […]
I realize the world has been anticipating my next blog post about Spike Lee’s Livin’ Da Dream. But the much awaited 1st quarter assessment of NBA 2K16’s Livin’ Da Dream was stalled midway through gameplay. I became mostly frustrated and upset at the cliché storylines, the bickering of Women of […]