The first real enemy I came across in Zenith was a horde of giant spiders. In a fantasy RPG, massive arachnids aren’t uncommon monsters to encounter, and are something of a cornerstone when it comes to game worlds full of magical adventures. What I didn’t expect, however, was for the […]
I recently watched the documentary Can We Take a Joke? When Outrage and Comedy Collide. As you might imagine, the premise is that outrage is ruining comedy. I was curious. We hear similar arguments here at NYMG: We are ruining video games. We just want to take away everyone’s fun. […]
We’ve been grappling, the past couple weeks, with a game called Bound, and we’ve been particularly struck by the game’s ambiguous narrative and by its surreal landscapes. And something we continue to ask ourselves is–what is the purpose of the conversation between the two, between the narrative and the gameworld? […]
In recent weeks and months social media and television media has given me a lot to think about in terms of the sexualization of the black body. From Lena Dunham’s ignorant comments about Odell Beckham Jr. on social media to my own experience watching a television show on Netflix to […]
As we’ve talked about on the podcast, Sam and I have both been reading Katherine Isbister’s How Games Move Us, but while she’s been open chatty, I’ve been reserving my thoughts. For me, there’s a lot to wrestle with, because the book directly engages with a lot of ideas I’ve […]
Trigger Warning: This article contains descriptions of suicide attempts and depressive episodes. This article contains spoilers for Undertale’s Neutral and True Pacifist Route. — There’s a kid sitting on the roof of a house. They’re only two stories up, but they think they’re high enough. They’ve been up there for […]
Episode 136: Dangerous Depictions: A Conversation with Tommi Godwin (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we are joined by guest, Tommi Godwin. Tommi is a veteran, she was an officer, a sentinel, and a woman deployed in Iraq in 2005-2006. She […]
Last weekend, the two of us played Bound (Plastic Demoscene Group), a game released last month that makes use of surreal landscapes and surreal storytelling. And its surreality and fluid fragmentation seem to work to construct a narrative and world that shifts and changes, that asks us to constantly question the […]
It’s a long running joke between friends of mine (ok, mostly between Sam and I), that I hate narrative. I skip quest text, I skip cut scenes, and I never look up the lore to a game I play. This semester, however, has thrown me into the narrative deep end. […]
My knowledge of Overwatch prior to actually playing it had nothing to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the surrounding lore. Blizzard released official information on setting, backstory, and character histories via YouTube videos both before and after the game’s official release in May of 2016, which […]
Invisibility Blues is back for a discussion of the position of games criticism within the industry, and the sometimes unfortunate response to critical work viewed as damaging to gaming communities. We would like to thank writer Tauriq Moosa for joining us this time around as we discuss our roles as critics, […]
The new academic year is upon us and we have resumed normal activities: developing courses, revising syllabi, faculty meetings, advising students, and of course, catching up on research projects we didn’t complete this summers. We are experts now on navigating teaching, research, and service. The Big Three is etched into […]
This weekend, my mother came to visit me in my new town, and we managed to get a lot of play time in even while exploring the new town. We played with LEGO, which mostly involved repairing her LEGO camper that had suffered heavy damage during its last trip; my mother […]
I ended my blog post last week with some lingering questions I still have about the representation of single motherhood as a destructive and dysfunctional force in The Park, which doesn’t feel like a particularly satisfying way to wrap up my examination of the game. So I want to spend […]
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 […]
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 […]