I walk nervously into my local game shop. I usually go in alone, and as a woman, I typically feel out of place. There are about twenty men in the adjacent room playing Magic and only a few stragglers browsing the impressive board game collection. Today it isn’t my gender […]
alexlayne
211 posts
In a recent Games and Culture article, “’I can Defend Myself’: Women’s Strategies for Coping with Harassment While Gaming Online,” author Amanda Cote presents research and interview data collected to show how women and other targeted groups deal with constant online harassment. She found five main ways women cope: “These […]
After reading a fabulous article on ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, by Marie Hicks, a lot of interesting ideas started flowing about the nature of social control and technology. Hicks writes of online dating, “rather than revolutionizing how people met and married, this article shows how […]
You get what you deserve. There’s a song about it. It’s used over and over in conversation when delighting in the downfall of one’s enemy. Motivational speakers use the saying to try and help audience members buy into whatever program they’re selling. It seems like such a simple concept. It […]
Full disclosure, I have read Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens five times. Cover to freaking cover, I have read it five times. That’s about three full times more than I have ever read any book. I have read it so many times because it is like a really good board […]
Art can reflect reality. Art can mimic reality. Art can argue for a new and better reality. Art can even make us question reality. Art often is about perspective: seeing things, feeling things, understanding things from an alternative perspective. That’s what makes art such a powerful medium for personal growth […]
The issue of mental illness in games has been an important topic in the games community for the past few years, though it has yet to really breach the world of game studies in academia. Here at NYMG we have published two pieces dedicated to the issue, and have mentioned […]
I went a bit off the rails recently when it comes to buying new games and gaming accessories. Maybe I was shopping away my anxiety about the status of the world politically and environmentally; who knows. But the recent games and gadgets have helped reignite my love of gaming in […]
The Civilization franchise has long been one of my favorites. My character on the NYMG banner, for example, is a play on a character from the Civ series. I love it. So of course, I had to buy Civilization VI when it came out. I’ve been playing it for a […]
In a recent article, “Apparent Feminism as a Methodology for Technical Communication and Rhetoric,” Erin Frost proposes a new methodology through which to understand the impact of technology and technological documentation: apparent feminism. Apparent feminism, she writes, “seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for […]
Games and Culture recently published a fascinating article,”Framing Gaming: The Effects of Media Frames on Perceptions of Game(r)s”, written by Anna Sophie Kümpel and Alexander Haas, about the influence of media portrayals of video games and gamers on beliefs about gaming. Now, it might seem like the simplest thing in the […]
Last week I wrote an article about my personal dissatisfaction with Facebook as a means of social networking or as a means of finding out news stories. And, as I’m sure many of you have seen, over the past week #NoDAPL supporters have voraciously used social media (whether spreading articles, […]
I wrote a piece when Pokemon Go first came out about the backlash Go-ers faced on social media for being happy and excited about the game. The general sentiment among some was that it was appalling to waste your time on PG when so much horrible shit was happening in […]
The energy in my house was electric. I read through the directions, slowly, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I had opened the package up on the drive home because I couldn’t wait to see what it looked like, what it felt like in my hands. There were so […]
In Part One of this series, I argued that feminist and cultural studies scholars can and should be talking about games that simulate reality. Often these types of games (sports, racing) get overlooked because they are simply supposed to mimic reality. Thus, any critique would de facto be a critique […]
Back in April I posted a thought piece on whether or not systems themselves can be the cause of harassment, hate, and toxicity. My post was inspired by a research study that found a strong correlation between systematic behaviors and human ones: when systems informed a player they were being […]