I’ve struggled with the concept of ‘gamer’ for a long time. I’ve always considered myself a gamer because of my engagement with the culture since I’ve been a child. But hearing many prominent feminists whom I respect and adore deny their gamer identity, I have begun to challenge my own […]
Miscellany
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Episode 110: Back to School Special: Learning With, Through, and Around Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). With school starting recently for all of us, we’ve been thinking a lot about games as educational spaces. In this episode we talk about lots […]
TW: I’m going to go ahead and tag this one for racism and racist imagery. This week a little bit of hell broke loose in the serious games space that quickly circulated to the mainstream. Serious Games Interactive tweeted about a game that they were playing, Playing History 2: Slave […]
A couple of weeks ago, I was both surprised and not surprised when the story about Target and the gendered toy signs blew up. I was not surprised because I know many people still cling to traditional view of gender and toys, but I was surprised by the level of […]
The fall semester began last week at Purdue, and I’ve been spending some time this past week catching up with other members of my cohort and meeting with professors to discuss my research goals. And I’ve been thinking about a few things as a result of these conversations—conversations that, of […]
You find yourself licking the salt from your lips, an automatic action, as you guide your small boat through a flooded metropolis, the motor sputtering like an old man struggling to catch a breath. The encompassing silence in the seemingly desolate city would be crushing had it not been for […]
We have our newest guest writer and podcaster, Kishonna Gray! Kishonna is an Assistant Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. She is also the Founder & Director of the Critical Gaming Lab housed in the School of Justice Studies. Kishonna completed her PhD in 2011 at Arizona […]
This semester, I’m trying a few different things in the classroom. I’m teaching in, and doing curriculum development for, a specialized program in conjunction with our college of tech, so this fall is all about (reasoned) experimentation. All the first-year writing students in this program are tech students who are all enrolled […]
There’s an article that I’ve seen making the rounds on Facebook called “Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and the War on ‘Unlikable Women.'” And I read it, not because I necessarily have any strong feelings (in any direction) about Ariana Grande or Kim Kardashian but because I am struck by the […]
Recently there have been a couple of different articles that have addressed the way that girls and women interact with technology and how their experiences are affected by their interactions in games (via voice chat) or the ways that they perceive or are perceived by the community. As the mother […]
Episode 109: Games, Identification, and Culture: A Conversation with Adrienne Shaw (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). Not a milestone episode numerically, but what a shift: we added contributor Bianca Batti to the podcast crew (finally!) and were joined by our dear friend Kishonna Gray and […]
Do you frequently play games online in multiplayer mode? When you play online, do you use a mic to communicate to other players? According to a report entitled “Teens, Technology and Friendships” released by the Pew Research Center, if you’re a teenage girl, the answer to both of these questions […]
Last week, I rushed home to Arkansas because my mother was having surgery to remove tumors that had been discovered on her right ovary. Her tests came back with cancer markers, and the mass was growing so rapidly, nearly doubling in size in a matter of days, so we all […]
Last year, as I was getting ready to move out to Indiana to begin my Ph.D. program, I watched the first season of the French television series The Returned. As I watched each episode (while I piled books into boxes and wrapped plates up in paper), I was struck by […]
People often ask me why I maintain a cache of nigh ancient game consoles when all of the old games are now available on emulators or virtual console. It might be the archivist in me, it might be the hoarder in me, or I very well be a gaming snob, […]
We occasionally get pushback from the Internet, whether it’s in the form of people seeking to engage or those seeking nothing more than to harass people they don’t agree with. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much par for the course on the Internet these days. But, last week, Anita Sarkeesian backed Sam […]