For those who may have missed our last podcast, we had an incredible interview with author Christa Charter. In the interview, Charter narrates the struggle between portraying a female protagonist who is sexual, and likes her sexuality, and one who is a slut. She found in her research that there […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
In case you haven’t figured it out, I have a thing for video games and I have for as long as I can remember. Going all of the way back to handheld blips on a virtual (though painted on) football field that I fought over with my cousins. And now, […]
I have been waiting a long time for Assassin’s Creed III (and ACIII:Liberation, but I’ll save that for another post). I pre-ordered my copy, mapped out my gameplay time, and did the happy dance when I learned that my mother would be visiting during the release window so that Pea […]
You have seen me rant before about peoples’ perception of my gaming as research practices. This time around I want to do something a little different. I recently saw a call for a special issue of the journal Well Played that wanted people to answer the question “What does it […]
The cake is a lie. Especially when you are talking about having your cake and eating it too. For years video game developers and company execs have been telling us that their use of racial stereotypes in games was not as racist as we wanted to make it seem. That […]
This week Democrat Congressional (Maine) candidate Colleen Lachowicz was outed by Republicans. Lachowicz is not, as far as we know, gay, but she is a gamer. Lachowicz’s opponents have started their own site, Colleen’s World (You can Google it because I refuse to give them an active link), in an attempt to […]
Here’s a shocker…racism is alive and well in the video gaming community. We are growing more and more accustomed to seeing it perpetuated among gamers and in the video games themselves. Oftentimes we find ourselves blaming the use of racist and sexist stereotypes in video games on a lack of […]
The following video asks the question of whether or not video games are art. Enjoy! Games featured: Journey, Bastion, Braid, Sword and Sorcery, Limbo and The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom.
This post is about some recent activity that has been flourishing because of a blog post by Nice Girl on the blog Nice Girls Like Sex Too. The blog post, titled “The Dark Side of Geek Feminism” reports the perception of one woman on attending OSCON (a foss conference). Rather […]
So we have just returned from the fabulous GLS (Games, Learning, ad Society) Conference at UW Madison. It is really a great conference: a good mix of professionals from industry, developers, academics, researchers, and K-12 teachers; lots of good tech to check out and play with (as anyone who got […]
A couple of weeks ago I promised that I would post the talk that I gave on games and bioethics at RSA. Now I have finally gotten around to doing it! What follows is (loosely) the text of my talk along with the slides from my presentation which have been […]
For a huge portion of my life, I had fit the stereotypical role of the “hardcore gamer”. I remember reserving Super Mario Bros. 3 just for rental because of the footage I’d seen in the movie The Wizard. I pre-ordered the PS1, PS3, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, while trading for […]
So I’ve been thinking about my posts lately, plus a comment a friend made to me, and I realize that a lot of what I do is talk about talking about video games rather than talking about the video games themselves. It led me to think more about the role […]
I am a lesbian and a gamer and I make no excuses for either of those things. It has been a very, very long time since I have tried to hide either of them. I am unapologetic though I get disapproving looks from most folks for one or the other […]
I just gave a talk at CCCC’s about the project Sam and I did on female video game podcasters. I talked about the research we had done, what we found, and what I hoped our community of academics could do with the information we found. There are two (sort of […]
I have a love/hate relationship with war games…always have and I probably always will. I am a bit of an aggressive gamer. I like to run and gun. Shooting things after a long stressful day usually makes me feel better. I am a sucker the CoD:MW# games. I like going […]