This week I read a piece by Ed Smith called “Shut Up, Gaming Positivity,” in which Smith discusses what he sees as today’s “atmosphere of ‘gaming positivity.’ It’s a dream shared among developers and critics for gaming to be wonderful, smart, happy and successful—a willingness to force smiles and wave […]
Bianca Batti
68 posts
Alisha and Ashley brought a game called Who’s Your Daddy to my attention this week. According to Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku, “Who’s Your Daddy is an early access multiplayer game. One person plays as the dad, and another person can play as the baby. The baby has but one goal: to […]
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 […]
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 […]
In my last post, I talked about the fact that my own liminal position as someone working concurrently within several fields—namely, literary studies, game studies, and women’s studies—has caused me to think a lot about how it is I might make use of these fields’ overlapping and similar concerns to […]
I took a feminist methodologies class this past semester, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make use of feminist methodologies in my own work and my own research on games and literature. What seems important when conceptualizing of such thinking and practice is that there […]
I came across an article the other day by Hannah Dwan called “Slicing Up Eyeballs: Abject in Gaming,” in which Dwan discusses the manner in which Julia Kristeva’s conception of abjection is vital for the horror genre and is especially representable in video games: Horror is a genre that, despite […]
I read Jorge Albor’s “The Games I Fear to Play: Reflecting on the Personal in Games” the other day, in which Albor considers the manner in which games represent personal experiences, arguing that games “do a damn good job of instigating self-reflection.” Indeed, Albor believes that it is perfectly “reasonable […]
I finished playing Rise of the Tomb Raider this past week, and while I’ve written about the game a lot this month, I wanted to devote at least one more (but, most likely, not the last) post to exploring my thoughts upon completing the game–a review, of sorts. I’ve written […]
I’ve written a couple posts on Rise of the Tomb Raider already because I’ve been playing the game a lot lately, and while I’ve been playing, I’ve also been watching Jessica Jones on Netflix. As a result of my concurrent engagement with both, I’ve been thinking that the two seem to […]
I’ve been playing more Rise of the Tomb Raider this week, and in the course of my doing so, I’ve been thinking more about the manner in which parenthood is represented in the game. And there are two characters, specifically, whose roles in the game, whose relationships and interactions with […]
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the construction of motherhood in Alien: Isolation and Among the Sleep, and since then, I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and thinking a lot about how parenthood is constructed in this game as well. Indeed, it would seem that, […]
Alisha recently alerted me to a piece making the rounds on Facebook called “Ghoul, You’ll Be a Woman Soon: Supernatural Puberty and the Horror of Periods,” in which Emalie Soderback discusses a subgenre of film that she likes to call “supernatural-period-girl-horror.” Soderback begins this examination by laying its foundations: Rosemary’s […]
Last week, I read an article by Mike Mariani called “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies,” and it got me thinking about the folkloric and mythological trajectory of the undead. Indeed, what strikes me about Mariani’s article is his argument that our current pop culture iterations of the zombie whitewash […]
My parents came out to visit last weekend, and while they were here, my mom and I played through the first few hours of Until Dawn together. As we played, I was reminded of the fact that, growing up (and still), I often bonded with my mom over horror movies, […]
Last week, I had to read Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century for a course on antebellum American literature that I’m taking this semester, and in it, Margaret Fuller critiques the gender hierarchies and relationship patterns that she saw occurring in the nineteenth century. But one moment in the […]