I read an article by Margaret Atwood recently in which she discusses the idea of freedom and argues that, today, we are “double-plus unfree” due to the fact that, as Atwood puts it, we have “handed the keys to those who promised to be our defenders but who have become, […]
Bianca Batti
68 posts
I finally got around to playing through Her Story last week, and as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a game can be and what a game can do. Indeed, Alisha has already written previously about the fact that there is even discussion about whether or not […]
So, I have some things to say about “resting bitch face.” For those of you who may have been living under a rock up until reading this post, “resting bitch face,” as Jessica Bennett explains in a recent New York Times piece, “I’m Not Mad. That’s Just My RBF.,” is […]
Alisha asked me something earlier this week, and since it’s something that’s been nagging at me since, I figured, hey, maybe it’s about time I write about it in an effort to explore the subject more deeply. The subject at hand is perhaps best introduced in the paraphrasing of Alisha’s […]
As I mentioned during our latest episode of the NYMG podcast, I’ve been playing Until Dawn, and the game has got me thinking about a few different things that I’d like to spend some time parsing through, like the game’s representation of things like gender and race, how it is that […]
The fall semester began last week at Purdue, and I’ve been spending some time this past week catching up with other members of my cohort and meeting with professors to discuss my research goals. And I’ve been thinking about a few things as a result of these conversations—conversations that, of […]
There’s an article that I’ve seen making the rounds on Facebook called “Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, and the War on ‘Unlikable Women.'” And I read it, not because I necessarily have any strong feelings (in any direction) about Ariana Grande or Kim Kardashian but because I am struck by the […]
Last year, as I was getting ready to move out to Indiana to begin my Ph.D. program, I watched the first season of the French television series The Returned. As I watched each episode (while I piled books into boxes and wrapped plates up in paper), I was struck by […]
I’ve been catching up on some much overdue research this summer, and in the course of my reading, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about critique and immersion. Indeed, it would seem that, often, when people discuss critical thinking and scholarship in relation to video games, they usually work under […]
Update: Several of our readers have reached out to us about the title of this post, and I wanted to make sure that their voices are heard and that we take the opportunity to begin a conversation about it by addressing their concerns. Here is one such email we received, […]
I’ve played about an hour and a half of The Magic Circle, and, to be completely honest, I haven’t yet figured out whether or not I like it. I think I do. But I’m not sure. I’m mainly confused, but not really in a way that makes me annoyed or irritated […]
This past week, I’ve been catching up on reading Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, and a series of questions that Shaw asks in the second chapter (entitled “Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft?: Unpacking Identification in Video Games”) […]
At a party a few weeks ago, I ran into a guy who was in UCSD’s undergraduate literature/writing program at the same time I was, and, in the course of our conversation that evening, we found ourselves eventually turning from the typical small talk (Hi! How are you? What are […]
I got married last weekend and, coincidentally, that same weekend, the New York Times published a trend piece that explores the fact that the number of women keeping their maiden names after marriage is on the rise. And I say “coincidentally” because I just so happen to be one of […]
I am a sucker for a good spy story. And when those spies are also cyberpunk hackers, then all the better. So when I discovered that Invisible, Inc. is a game that features such hacker-spies, suffice it to say I was pretty excited to play it. Invisible, Inc., developed by […]
Moms have it rough, man. I’m talking socially, of course, considering the fact that the United States is only one of two countries in the world that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers. (Get it together, United States.) But I’m also talking representationally, and it is this particular […]