In my last post, I wrote a bit about the implications that motherhood and maternal thinking have for the rendering of the protagonist Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn. Since then, I’ve been thinking more about the construction of female protagonists, especially since I’ve started reading Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s […]
Games and Culture
337 posts
Yesterday, the news that EA was shutting down Visceral Games and passing off their developing Star Wars title in order to shape it into something else dominated a great deal of community discussion. As more details emerged, one thing became clear: for EA, at least, with their “games as service” […]
When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to learn more about how the community functioned, my project was […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried like hell to get my hands on game scripts and bibles. After assessing the lack of good informational texts and examples for students interested in writing games, or writing for game studios, I couldn’t think of a more pressing need or a bigger […]
“[T]he content of their character” is a phrase that almost everyone is familiar with even if they are not quite sure why. “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but […]
Episode 158: The Two Jaakko Problem: The Problem of Representation in Game Studies (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we chat about the perils and pitfalls of having a particular history of a the field of game studies laid out in a journal […]
We had our most recent Gaming for Good marathon last weekend, during which I played a few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn. And also last weekend, the series Orphan Black had its final episode. Both Orphan Black and Horizon Zero Dawn deal with cloning, motherhood, and technology, so I’ve been thinking […]
The following contains spoilers for the plot of the Balance Arc of The Adventure Zone. Last week, I spent my Thursday night pacing around my apartment listening to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Adventure Zone. After three years and 69 episodes, the D&D comedy podcast […]
Representation matters. This is something that we have said countless times. It matters in games, in game development teams, in games communities, and in the world at large (especially in our current political environment). Over the course of the last couple of months we have spent several podcast episodes talking […]
Perception (2017) by The Deep End Games is above all else a psychological horror game about connection. And the game itself begins with one woman’s search for connection. Cassie, the protagonist, is a blind woman who has been drawn to a house by dreams about the house, a rope, a ticket, […]
I’ve been trying to get caught up on some reading this summer, and one of the series that I’ve been digging into the past couple months is that of The Expanse. It’s a science fiction series by James S. A. Corey, which is actually the pen name under which two […]
Episode 155: Rebooting Boyhood and Playing Games For Girls: A Conversation with Carly Kocurek (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we have a conversation with Carly Kocurek, author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering […]
The fifth and final season of Orphan Black began a couple weeks ago. It’s a show about human clones—about how being a clone might impact both one’s personal identity and one’s relationship to others (that is, one’s potential roles as sister, daughter, mother, partner). But more than that, the show […]
Recently I took a survey about places in games and it’s been on my mind ever since. The questions were all about my favorite places in games, but the more I consider the topic, the more I think about important places in games rather than my favorite places – the […]
As the semester ended, I spent a little time with Crusader Kings II again, as I often do when I have some free time at last. I sink in for a few days and decompress, and then I ignore the game for months. But this time, as I played, I […]
Last weekend I finally made it to the theater (with Alisha–she was brave) to see Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). I’ve wanted to see it for a while, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to see the film alone. Miraculously I had avoided spoilers in the […]