On Saturday, October 8, 2016 we are hosting our fourth Gaming for Good event. This time we have chosen Stop Soldier Suicide as our charity (link to donation portal below). Every day an average of 20+ veterans and 1 active duty soldier take their own lives. Because of the stigma […]
Yearly Archives: 2016
260 posts
One thing that critics like myself don’t do nearly enough is nod to just how difficult it is to be a game creator. Every game is flawed. Every game designer is flawed. It is easy to pick something out after a game is released and say you would have done […]
This holiday weekend was one of the first times my daughter and I had to just relax and spend time alone since the beginning of the school year a month ago, so when she asked if we could stay home and write/plan/make a Minecraft machinima (like all good nerdlings), I […]
I’ll be blunt: I didn’t want to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but with the controversy around the game’s engagement with/appropriation of (depending on whom you ask) racial issues and activist movements, it’s an essential experience for someone looking for the human in the code. Mankind Divided promised humanity in […]
There is something aesthetically appealing about historical games that I value and appreciate. While I am not a huge fan of contemporary war games, I am fascinated with games that feature historical combat. One of my favorite games of all time is Call of Duty: World at War. This game […]
Episode 135: Just Too Canadian: A Conversation on Feminist Game Studies with Emma Vossen (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk with outgoing Editor-in-Chief of First Person Scholar, Emma Vossen (University of Waterloo) about feminist game studies, “doing” game studies […]
I’m currently working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. I’m writing about it here because the book was described to me as feminist science fiction written by a man. I had forgotten that description until I had gotten a little ways into the book, but it came back to me […]
Last week, I interrogated manifestations of single moms and mental health in Stranger Things and The Park, but I wanted to take some more time to think about how such representations occur across the horror genre. In other words, I find myself continuing to ask—what kinds of patterns do we […]
Note: I received a free review code for this game. But my review is not indebted to the company, nor is it influenced by it in any way. This game is on iOS for $4.99 As soon as I saw a review code for this iPad game come across our […]
There are lots of really cool board games available for children outside of the run of the mill Candy Land, Game of Life, and the like. In the last couple of years I have discovered more kid friendly versions of adult board games like Catan Junior, My First Carcassonne, and […]
Dex, a Kickstarter-funded 2D sidescroller cyberpunk RPG (that’s a mouthful) originally available in early access in 2014 recently hacked its way onto consoles, with PS4 and Xbox One releases this summer. As a fan of cyberpunk worlds, choice-based games, and running in profile down long hallways, I figured I’d give […]
This week has been a bit of a family gaming challenge. While I have wanted to do nothing more than play No Man’s Sky in my now limited, school-started-back-this-week, gaming time, my daughter has wanted to play Minecraft every chance she’s gotten. And it’s understandable in many ways, both games […]
CW: Rape, Harassment, Threats About a month ago, LEGO released the new Ghostbusters Ecto 1 & 2 set, which included the new female characters. On that day, someone from Reddit posted a picture of his or her 6-year-old daughter excitedly holding her new set. If I recall correctly, the set […]
Last month, I wrote about the ways feminist science fiction reimagines motherhood and the ways this reimagining of maternal power highlights the limitations in video games’ (often fraught) depictions of motherhood. Lately, after watching Stranger Things, I’ve been thinking particularly about articulations of single motherhood, how it is single mothers […]
Space travel has always been fascinating to me. Not fascinating enough to make me want to actually go to space, but definitely intriguing enough to watch it from afar. I blame this, in part, on my mother. When I was a child we watched Star Trek every Sunday. It was […]
On the way to the (final!) Games+Learning+Society conference last week, my friend and co-presenter Tony and I were talking about hard games, and failure. We focused on how games were organized during the arcade era, around the lives bought with a quarter and how this helped shape not only games, […]