In this interview Kishonna talks with Kahlief Adams, host of Spawn on Me blog and podcast and creator of #Spawn4Good, about race, games, and activism. KG: Give us a little bit of your background. How did you get into gaming? What’s the first game you remember? KA: My name is Kahlief […]
Games and Race
48 posts
As I sat down to give my post a once over before running it today I got a Twitter notification that lots of people were sharing that same tweet so, being the ultimate procrastinator, I clicked over to see what was going on. It was the story of the auctioning […]
So this week I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diversity and the insidious nature of racism. More specifically I’ve been looking at and thinking about something that gets called by Claude M. Steele, in Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, a stereotype threat. According to […]
Episode 126: A Conversation Under the Shade Tree With André Brock. (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with André Brock (aka @DocDre). André is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan and is currently completing a […]
After completing NBA 2K’s Living Da Dream, I was left only with feelings of wishful thinking: wishing that gaming would allow characters of color to exist in a fantasy world of possibilities. Instead, we were once again handed a series of tropes, stereotypes, respectability politics, and essentialist assumptions about Black […]
I have been keeping an active tab counting the number of women of color in positions of power and control in video games. And before I proceed, I know someone will fill the comments with Purna and Shiva but I am looking for representation outside of the zombie-killing Black girl […]
Michonne is my favorite character in The Walking Dead universe, in both the show and the comic, so when word came down that she was the first of the characters to get her own Telltale outing, I was thrilled (other comic characters have shown up, but never served as the […]
As we started our sixth year here at Not Your Mama’s Gamer, we pledged anew to do the work of social change, to work harder to take that work offline, and to pursue our Gaming for Good Initiative more aggressively. And with our pledge it seems that the universe heard […]
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 […]
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 […]
After my Ode to Lara’s Thigh Gap, I started pondering on why a critical evaluation of female body types in video games is important for consideration in the first place. In other words, why were some people vehemently in support of my perspective while others cheered me on? It was […]
Last week Naughty Dog gave us a new glimpse at Uncharted 4 and we got to see Nadine Ross. Nadine looked like a kick ass Black female character who was clearly taking no shit from Nathan Drake. Some people were excited, some were skeptical about the possibility of another aggressive […]
I realize the world has been anticipating my next blog post about Spike Lee’s Livin’ Da Dream. But the much awaited 1st quarter assessment of NBA 2K16’s Livin’ Da Dream was stalled midway through gameplay. I became mostly frustrated and upset at the cliché storylines, the bickering of Women of […]
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 […]
Our work at NYMG has always been in service of making games better for everyone. This includes the community that loves games, the industry that makes them, and the academics that talk about them incessantly (myself included). Some people don’t like the way we go about this. In particular, some […]
So this week I finally played Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. I haven’t purchased the game for home because I have a ridiculous backlog of games that have come out in the last month and Fallout 4 and Tomb Raider are both looming for release next month. But […]