When I tell people I teach game design, they often immediately assume I do programming. And yes, I do some of that, but as anyone that teaches game design will tell you, it’s much more than that. Increasingly I think of my job as advocating for a compositional approach to […]
Monthly Archives: April 2015
48 posts
The line between adventure games and interactive fiction is at best a little blurry, and sometimes doesn’t exist at all, and finding that line in author Matthew Burnside’s forays into interactive media and games is a particular challenge. Often, in adventure games that skew toward interactive fiction, the plot’s the […]
Last night, some of the women of the NYMGamer team started tweeting under #yesIplay. #yesIplay is about telling the stories of of “gamers”—a term we’re using loosely here—that are often silenced or questioned. video games, board games, whatever and however you want to define it. #yesIplay is intersectional; we want to hear […]
I recently had an enthralling conversation with a close friend about the various representations of strong female characters. My friend, using Morrigan from the first Dragon Age game as an example, explained that the sorceress doesn’t have to forfeit her traditionally feminine appearance to be a strong and able character. […]
Yesterday, a flare-up on Twitter revealed the Honey Badger Brigade, a satiric group supporting men’s rights, managed to have a booth at Calgary Expo with merchandise featuring the GamerGate logo and its Vivian James mascot. In addition to selling GamerGate-themed merch, the Honey Badger Brigade appeared at the “Women Into Comics” panel, […]
The minute I saw that Vice branched out to Vice Gaming, I was thrilled. Vice is a lot of things: Vice Magazine started in Canada in 1994 and quickly gained a reputation for having politically incorrect, provocative content. In 2002, the British edition of Vice was started, and by 2007 […]
Episode 99: August and Everything After: An Actual Discussion on Ethics and Gamers (Right click and save as to download, or hit us up on iTunes or Stitcher) This week, Alex, Alisha, and Sam talked GamerGate, the continuing, shifting mass that continues to dominate so much of the discussion of […]
The official Time 100 list of influential people debuted today, and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian made the list thanks to her tireless efforts to widen the conversation around gaming and gaming culture in the face of continuous waves of harassment. Sarkeesian was profile by geek icon Wil Wheaton, who detailed […]
Romance can sometimes be a tricky and troubling thing, and it appears that this is no different in the the virtual world. In my review of Story of Seasons, a new addition to the Harvest Moon franchise that had to undergo a name change due to licensing issues, I described […]
The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, the National Council of Women’s Organizations, and the National Organization for Women, along with House Rep Katherine Clark (D-Mass) held a congressional briefing today on the ongoing issues of violence, harassment, and stalking in the online arena. Speakers included Michelle […]
Last week, I reviewed the first hour of Flying Mollusk’s Nevermind, which mostly meant I worked my way through the training session and a bit of the first real part of the game. In my initial gameplay, I was introduced to some heavy possible directions for the narrative: an alcoholic mother, […]
While the rest of us were enjoying TableTop Day this weekend in the privacy of our own homes (or in public if we so chose), Anita Sarkeesian was at a Columbus, OH game parlor having her photograph taken without her permission and posted (and RT’ed) on Twitter. This is problematic […]
Does someone who hates you deserve your pity? Your understanding? You empathy? A friend of mine once said that she feels bad for the men she argues with on sports fan websites, because it’s clear no one has ever loved them. They’ve never been touched by a hand that signified […]
Last week, I shared some analysis of gender signifiers in character models from State of Decay, a game that seems to do a good job of presenting practically dressed and designed characters, while also featuring some diversity in body types and more. A commenter pointed out, however, that including some […]
Not all disabilities are visible. Not even the physical ones. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t affect the ways that we interact with technologies. I know that Alisha and I suffer with some pretty nasty RSIs (repetitive stress injuries) and I have some pretty significant hearing loss in one […]
Recently I was asked by a group of graduate students (not my own) why I do games research. It’s a question that I get frequently and the answer is not usually what people expect. Or at least not fully so. They expect me to tell them how I see my […]