On Saturday, February 13, 2016 we are hosting our second Gaming for Good event. The Gaming Mammothon seeks to raise money for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), which provides education and detection services for women across the country. Founded in 1991, the NBCF provides free and low-cost mammograms to […]
Last night I found myself browsing Steam demos, as I often do. Every couple of months I’ll find one or two that catch my eye, but more often than not, I scroll through the list and discover there’s nothing that particularly sparks my interest. More exciting is the occasional demo I get […]
As promised, my ESL composition class played A Bird Story and it’s been a wonderful and insightful experience reading their reactions to a game they’ve deemed as unworthy of “gaming” status (I’ll touch on this a bit below); they didn’t anticipate that I would, however, expect this reaction from them regarding a […]
So, an odd thing has happened since the end of last year when I lost my urge to shoot things (in the game), I have once again found my love of puzzle based games. It started with me playing more games on my phone and on my 3DS because they […]
LEGO has always been fiercely protective of its brand and reputation, and even though their decisions don’t always make sense, they have tried to stay away from politics and violent themes. Their approach has always seemed somewhat contradictory to me. I’ve written about their aversion to politics before, and I […]
This week, I came across an article by E. McNeill called “History and Games” in which McNeill makes connections between the subject of history and the subject of video games. Indeed, McNeill engages in such a discussion even though, as he says, many “people seem to view history as dry […]
Recently, as I re-read Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design, I kept thinking about the differences between the games Koster was using as examples and the games I’ve most often been writing about lately, the indies and the so-called walking simulators, games that often have low levels […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about my transition to Games Studies this last semester and the role it plays (and will play) in my research as a Second Language Studies student; I’ve also been pondering on the role of intersectionality lately, specifically how Latoya Peterson admonishes in her article, Intersectionality […]
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others? -Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1957. It only seems fitting that the 5th anniversary of Not Your Mama’s Gamer fell on the weekend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday celebration. While many folks around the […]
Episode 119: Sometimes We Study Vaginas: The 5th Anniversary Episode (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). Tomorrow marks our fifth(!) anniversary, and in celebration, we gathered the whole current crew for this episode to talk games, origin stories, and why some of us refuse to […]
I recently read a piece by Thomas McMullan called “From Minecraft to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, How Real Life Imitates the Games We Play” in which McMullan discusses Oscar Wilde’s argument that life imitates art: “Wilde wrote that life imitates art more than art imitates life. We look at […]
When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s […]
Social media has been employed as a significant site of mobilizing for Black Lives Matter especially with the power of Black Twitter. This form of “social public” as Andre Brock outlines allows users to generate culturally relevant content and disseminate it to their audience. And that scope is beyond the […]
Christmas break is always an interesting time. You get to see and talk to people who you haven’t seen or talked to for a sustained period of time for a while. It becomes even more interesting when you play and/or study video games and the community that surrounds them. Some […]
Warning: MGSV spoilers, discussions of sexual violence and war within. Metal Gear is and has always been a weird beast. Sometimes the good guys are bad guys are good guys on the side and sometimes they’re all clones and have maybe exchanged a body part or two. In this universe, […]
This holiday season, with the release of Star Wars, I found myself thinking a lot about fandom and how our love of various things (games, LEGO, movie franchises, etc.) becomes part of our conversations in both real life and on the internet. I’m not a fan of Star Wars. I […]