I’m currently sitting here at a coffee shop with Sam, and I realized I hadn’t put up my post for this week. As I tried to think about what I should talk about, I found that I could only think about one thing: Don’t Starve, the indie game I’ve been […]
Miscellany
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It’s been a while since I’ve done a play with your kids post because not much has changed in these parts. We are still doing a second play through of Ni No Kuni and spending far too much precious gaming time on Animal Crossing: New Leaf…both Pea and I. And […]
The Bechdel Test, first introduced by cartoonist Alison Bechdel as a part of her comic strip entitled Dykes to Watch Out For, is a test that gauges female representation in film. It revolves around three simple rules: one, that the piece of work has at least two named female characters; […]
After years of being a quiet, shy, and somewhat sheltered girl I learned the hard way how valuable it is to just be yourself in life and not care what others think. I come from a family of women who were taught to understand their strength as women, but who […]
Confession: I almost didn’t finish The Last of Us, and I’m going to tell you why. Spoilers abound here. You’ve been warned. In the months before the release of Naughty Dog’s take on an infected apocalypse, I heard the hype. I saw some images, but avoided trailers (in an effort […]
Story in video games is one of those controversial topics, though no video game would exist, let alone be successful, without story. Some of the very first debates about video games, arguments that would eventually become the foundation of Game Studies as a field, were about narratology and ludology, or […]
Since San Diego Comic Con is right around the corner (as in this Thursday!), I figured I would shed some light on the learning curve that occurs when you attend your first few comic cons. This past year I took my boyfriend to his first con ever and it reminded […]
I don’t want to hear whining because this info is a “no duh” for you game pros. It wasn’t that long ago that we all experienced our first Steam sale. Maybe you even have a few games from that sale that you haven’t gotten around to. But let’s be honest, […]
I’m a woman and a gamer and I have been for 37 years, since I was a girl of 7 fighting with my cousins over handheld Coleco games. 1976. Back before we even thought about female characters in games. Our characters were blips on the screen. No head, no body, […]
It’s no secret that I’m quite the peruser of the fandom-friendly social media site Tumblr. It not only creates an open environment for fandom flailing but also acts as a medium for average users to call out the various issues and controversies that occur in said fandoms and mainstream society […]
The internet can be a dark and scary place. Internet trolls reside in many places, but are most commonly found lurking on the comment sections of blogs and YouTube, in online multiplayer games, or really just anywhere more than two people are able to communicate and fight with each other […]
I gave my son his first controller when he was six months old, an old Xbox brick that he could pound on while he was sitting in his high chair. The shiny buttons didn’t fascinate him as much as I’d hoped, but like any delighted gamer mama, I snapped photos […]
What is a gamer? This question is at the center of what it means to study women or feminism in games. It is in this label of “gamer” that we are most often excluded. Of course we couldn’t be “gamers” because girls don’t play games, they don’t play real games, […]
Convention season is underway and as the E3, one of the biggest gaming conventions of the year, and its hype slowly dies down, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about booth babes. For those not in the know, booth babes are models who are hired to accompany a […]
When most people think of comics and comic books, they think of superheroes and boys. For a long time strong male characters have been the face of comic books; Superman, Batman, Captain America, Thor… you get the idea. When Wonder Woman was introduced she offered something that comics had lacked […]
What does it mean to call a game a companion? Referring to a story, or a favorite fictional character, as a companion seems easy enough to understand. I imagine that most of us had our own fantasy worlds growing up, where we were Peter Pan or Dorothy, or Falcor. We […]