Since I’ve been writing about game design and the amateur mafia community I’ve been playing with, I’ve noticed more and more how little information there is, in an academic sense, on the processes of game design. A colleague recently came to me for suggestions on behalf of one of her students […]
Yearly Archives: 2018
56 posts
For the last several years we have used the category “Play with Your Kids” to talk about how we play games with our children and which games we have enjoyed playing with them the most (or sometimes the least). For the last year I have been homeschooling my own daughter […]
Sea of Thieves is a Microsoft play anywhere title by Rare that is available for Xbox One and PC. It currently costs $59.99 US. Anyone who knows me knows I love pirates. Anything pirate themed immediately grabs my attention and gets me excited; my favorite movie of all time since […]
Recently after our president announced his plan to meet with executives in the video game industry to discuss the level of violence, particularly violence related to guns, children are exposed to in the entertainment medium, Nintendo dropped a surprise announcement for the next Super Smash Brothers installment. Super Smash Brothers, […]
Episode 169: The Stories of The Station: A Conversation with Kevin Harwood (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talked with Kevin Harwood, the Creative Director & Producer of The Station Games (The Station). We […]
Once again we are coming together as gamers and community members to play games and raise money for charity-gaming.org. Charity Gaming provides games to chronically ill children who are hospitalized. Being hospitalized is never any fun and it’s even less fun when you are a child who is hospitalized long […]
In many games, mental disorders are very much defined as auxiliary to the characters within the game. They are used to derive a sort of mechanic and are ignored narratively as they relate to character development and seriously dealing with these topics. Games like Amnesia, Don’t Starve, and The Evil […]
Video games allow us to play in the realm of the macabre. We can be monsters, killers, and super villains. We can exist in worlds that are full of human wreckage, zombies, death, decay. Like our fascination with post-apocalyptic movies and books, video games allow us to explore countless realms […]
Sometimes being a teacher means you have to have some tough conversations with your students. I think of them as dialogue wheel options, Bioware RPG style, when I’m standing in front of my freshman writing class. Every day my options light up depending on the topic to be taught, the […]
I’ve been pandering to my gaming nostalgia of late, replaying childhood favorites like Sly Cooper, playing new games that adhere to retro aesthetics like Celeste, playing basically anything by Nintendo (who seem to be masters of evoking a nostalgic vibe in all their games). During my latest phase of nostalgia, […]
Episode 168: She Came to Slay: A Conversation on Community Building and Video Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we are joined by NYMG and Mixer community member Nicole Kirchoff (@NKirc) as we talk about gaming, building community around games, and […]
Women as reward. It’s an unfortunately common sexist practice I see in many of the video games I have played and the video games I have seen marketed. Rewarding players with women, all women – not just those that are cisgendered, is equally problematic. While games use women and women’s […]
Content Warning: This post details sensitive and controversial topics that occur in Doki Doki Literature Club! It also contains plot and character spoilers. In my last post I went into detail on the unconventional gameplay of Team Salvato’s visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club!, while also mentioning the unexpected disclaimer that appears upon […]
Late last year, I stumbled across an ad for Mosaic, a film-based interactive story app helmed by film director Steven Soderbergh and starring Sharon Stone. Intrigued, I downloaded it immediately, but I never got very far. At the beginning, at least, “interactivity” seemed nonexistent, and while I appreciated the story for […]
Episode 167: No Such Thing As A Stupid Question: Taking On Your Questions (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week Alisha and Sam answer questions submitted to the show and throw in one (each) of their own. It was a shorter episode, but […]
If you’re like me, WoW was one of the most fun (and intense) gaming periods of your life. Many people I know went down a WoW hole for sometimes months, sometimes years. If you’re really like me, you’ve tried to go back several times, but the game had changed so […]