Last week, I was accused of making fun of people who play The Sims. I don’t know if this was in jest or not, but I took it to heart, either way. (And perhaps “accused” is too strong a work, but I can’t find a better one.) It’s true that […]
Yearly Archives: 2014
249 posts
Recent conversations on our blog, with my friends, in the gaming community, and generally spread throughout my daily life, have lead me to start thinking about what my personal “demands” for the future of gaming are. I put demands in intentional scare quotes- obviously I’m not really in a position […]
**I’ve peppered in real threats women have gotten playing video games, for those who don’t believe it’s a problem** “u act like ur good u down syndrome cunt ill rip ur ovaries out n make u eat em u mother fuckin spawn killin pathetic whore.” Today marks my first installment […]
Last week, the world went to the birds. Or, at least, the world of dating simulators. Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel developed by Moa Hato and PigeoNation. The protagonist is a female barbarian/cave dweller who is the only human student attending St. PigeoNation’s Institute—an elite, all-bird school. Your goal […]
Games bring people together. This is something that many of our ilk (gamers) seem to have forgotten. When I was a kid in the 70s we came together over handheld games with little blips playing various kinds of sportsball games. We came together to show each other what we could […]
It was only just a few days ago that I watched NFL athlete and Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice attack his wife in a brutal case of physical domestic violence. I’d heard about the incident in passing but it wasn’t until someone told me about it in detail that […]
Episode 85: Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again: More on “Gamergate” and Women in the Gaming Community (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) In this episode we talk about “gamergate” and community building among diverse gamer populations.
Last month I wrote about the release of the LEGO Ideas Research Institute set. This set, which is a collection of three female scientists, sold out on LEGO’s website within 6 days. Recently, LEGO announced on their website that the Research Institute would no longer be available online, but (hopeful) […]
I feel like all of our blog posts lately have started with something along the lines of “in the wake of recent conversations”. Nonetheless, here I go: in the wake of recent conversations, I’ve been thinking again about what seems to be an eternal debate among gamers and in game […]
As we have seen over and over in the past week, feminist are rarely, if ever, in full agreement on any topic. We may have general goals that we share, for example full equity for women, but as for how we go about that, it varies. I have even seen […]
As you may know, the Sims is one of my favorite franchises. In high school, my mom, my boyfriend, and I had a computer schedule so that we could each get the same number of Sims hours in per day. I was, am, and always have been, obsessed. People wonder […]
In my experience as a consumer of Japanese animation, I have found that most anime can be grouped into two overarching categories. The first are those that actively embrace fanservice or, in other words, scenes or even full sequences that pander to the male gaze in a distinctly sexual way. […]
Yesterday, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of watching anti-Sarkeesian YouTube videos. Many of the arguments against her are laughably ironic, but one in particular stood out to me as not ironic, but just sad. In the video, Anita was accused of shutting down the conversation because she has […]
At a faculty picnic last week I was asked if I was a gamer by a very well-meaning (but completely out of the loop) fellow faculty member. I almost laughed- it’s been a pretty rough few weeks in gaming culture and I know this faculty member didn’t have any idea […]
Game critic Anita Sarkeesian and her family were driven from their house earlier this week after she received a series of extremely violent sexual threats towards her and her parents. The week before that, game developer Zoe Quinn (creator of Depression Quest) had her personal life (both real and imaginary) […]