In what seems to be turning into a theme, LEGO has me once again scratching my head over yet another weird decision. LEGO Dimensions released last week, and I’ve been having a blast with it, as you know if you listened to our latest podcast, but the LEGO community at […]
Yearly Archives: 2015
379 posts
I read an article by Margaret Atwood recently in which she discusses the idea of freedom and argues that, today, we are “double-plus unfree” due to the fact that, as Atwood puts it, we have “handed the keys to those who promised to be our defenders but who have become, […]
No Man’s Sky, the procedurally generated universe-exploring created by the small team at Hello Games, may have made a splash at this year’s E3, but last night’s demo on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert launched the game into a whole new dimension. Hello Games’ co-founder Sean Murray seemed in his […]
So this semester one of the things that I have been doing (in my ample free time) is working on a diversity grant proposal to fund a tech/games/STEM based summer program for young girls of color. As I have been thinking through the minutiae of the project I have been […]
Episode 112: On LatinX Nerds and Hispanic Heritage Month: A Conversation with Sylvia Monreal (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). We sat down with Sylvia Monreal of ¿Como Se Dice Nerd? to talk about her Hispanic Heritage Month Game Jam, Latinx identity in gaming […]
Since we’ve been discussing Her Story again lately, I went back and replayed the beginning. The game initially seeds the player with four videos tagged with the keyword “murder,” and since the gameplay is built solely from searching keywords, I catalogued all the major options in these early videos, omitting articles and […]
This week, with the release of LEGO Dimensions, I’ve been thinking a lot about LEGO and cost. One of my favorite things about LEGO is the built in constraints: there are only so many pieces and colors to choose from. This is why I get such joy from a really […]
I finally got around to playing through Her Story last week, and as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a game can be and what a game can do. Indeed, Alisha has already written previously about the fact that there is even discussion about whether or not […]
I am going to have to start with full disclosure and admit that I played the first two versions of Animal Crossing on the DS and 3DS with something that bordered on addiction. With the first iteration I played the game every night until the battery in my DS died […]
(Spoilers ahead) Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn had me rolling my eyes from moment one. The first chapter, with its cast of self-centered teenagers and cliché narrative, annoyed me to my bones because it’s a scenario that perfectly fits in the horror movie framework and it’s one I’ve seen countless times […]
It’s starting to feel like fall, which always makes me want to watch scary movies and play creepy games. So, this morning I went looking for a spooky game on Steam, and I found Port of Call, a free to play indie adventure game. I like to play these quick […]
As a middle-aged (when did that happen) woman who plays games I often find myself in the situation where I am either called upon to “prove” my credibility as a gamer or simply ignored in gaming spaces. The former happens in both academic and non-academic spaces. Unfortunately in academic spaces […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Western approach to menstruation and how it factors into constructions of the ideas of (cis) womanhood, so it seemed like a happy bit of synchronicity when the Lammily doll’s new accessory popped up on my social […]
When the Skylanders game was first released I was kind of hooked. I played that game…a lot. I came to a new area that required a new element and immediately went out and bought new figures. I tried to get as many people hooked as I could so I didn’t […]
So, I have some things to say about “resting bitch face.” For those of you who may have been living under a rock up until reading this post, “resting bitch face,” as Jessica Bennett explains in a recent New York Times piece, “I’m Not Mad. That’s Just My RBF.,” is […]
LEGO first drew me back in almost 3 years ago after I fell instantly in love with the Space Shuttle Expedition set, but they hooked me with the level of thought and detail they put in their designs. Half the fun of building a LEGO set comes from the hidden […]