Winter (break) is coming! And that means that there is going to be a whole lot of catch up up going on among gamers everywhere. I think that I am starting off my run to diminish my pile of shame a bit. With the release of the next gen systems […]
Episode 91: The Happy Meal Argument: No Such Thing as a Boy/Girl Toy (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about gendered marketing of new toys (and the toys themselves) and wax nostalgic on toys in our own past. Join us as we […]
This week, with all of the terrible news, I wanted to play something light, so I picked up Tales from Deep Space. An Amazon Game Studios Kindle adventure, Tales from Deep Space is a cute adventure game for the Kindle Fire HDX and 2014 Kindle Fires, so the game is […]
Over the past few years, I have found myself mostly uninterested in Black Friday (or, is it now Black Thursday?). My mom and I used to go every year, although we never did any hardcore shopping. Instead, we just got up early and shopped around a bit for fun. My […]
This week I’m following up on a discussion of game mechanics started last week. To read part I, check here. So a quick recap: Mechanics are a special subset of game rules. Rules are the foundations of games, and they do all sorts of things. In poker, for example, hand […]
In this series we’ll be looking at some principles of game design, particularly as they relate to analysis and criticism. Check out the first part, about genre in gaming, here. While calls for objectivity in games reviewing have been with the media for quite some time, Gamergate seems to have […]
I know that it’s a bit early for sweeping comments 2014 seems to be the year of a lack of female character creation options. Or, more specifically, the removal of female character creation options for the sake of the game’s “quality.” This not so pleasant instance in this year’s list […]
The latest viral letter from LEGO made me a bit sad. The message is great, but reading it makes me sad because it was written in 1974, before I was born. Forty years ago LEGO wrote To Parents. The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and […]
Bear with me. This is raw. But raw is the best that I can muster right now. This post is not about games…but it is. I am a writer, a gamer, and an activist in no particular order and in no particular manner. I process things through my writing so today […]
Of course the last couple weeks I’ve been completely distracted by #GamerGate. It has consumed most of my free time, which was spent looking at articles and reading about new horrible things happening to women in the gaming community. Doing the research for my dissertation damn near killed me, not […]
It’s no secret that I have a real interest in games for educational purposes. And this interest extends to games that might be both fun and educational to my own 6 year old. So when I got the chance to review The Counting Kingdom by Little Worlds Interactive for iOS […]
Episode 90: Girls and Their Toys: On Toys Done Right (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) As we get closer to Christmas we hope to turn to happier things…like toys. In this episode we wanted to talk about toys and the ones that we think get it […]
The Alaska carefully crafted in Upper One Games’ first creation Never Alone is as beautiful as it is haunting; as enchanting as it is perilous. In some of the most treacherous lands in the continent a young girl named Nuna, accompanied only by an arctic fox known simply as Fox, […]
Last weekend, we got together to play table games. I don’t play a lot of table games, and I don’t know why because they are fun, but I think I sometimes get intimidated by all of the rules. Tabletop games seem to require the player to remember a lot while […]
World of Warcraft‘s new expansion, Warlords of Draenor, is out, an event that always revitalizes the nearly 10 year old game (for at least a few months). If you’re at all familiar with the game, you might be wondering to yourself “why did she put a picture from an old […]
I worry about what #GamerGate has done to the games community. Don’t get me wrong, it needed to happen, it was going to happen sooner or later, and a lot of shit got said that needed to get said. However, I worry about what the long-term repercussions will be because […]