It’s the holiday season, and I’m seeing a lot of interaction from friends talking about visiting families and holiday parties. Some friends are back at homes where they are loved and accepted; some friends are not. Some friends are with the family they were born into, and some friends are […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
Work on Dishonored 2 took time, such time that there’s no chance of the story purposefully mimicking too much of what’s happening in the world now, but then again, the story of what’s happening in the world now is an old one, a repeated cycle of suffering, the haves not […]
This article spoilers for Dark Souls and Bloodborne in entirety. “Remember, there are no happy endings in Dark Souls.” Wise words from my partner that I rapidly chose to ignore almost as much as Rule 1 (Don’t Get Greedy). It’s not that I wanted to ignore these. I typically take […]
It’s somewhere around 2001 or 2002. My twin sister and I have asked for a Game Boy Advance and Pokemon Silver for Christmas. My dad is not too happy about it. He tells us that gaming systems like that will make us “antisocial” and that games are something that should […]
We’ve been writing a bit about Westworld from a games studies perspective because it’s fascinating, but also because it’s a big, beautiful, visual version of so much we discuss already, and for me, with my interests in how we continue to think about the magic circle, and about player experience […]
Spoiler Alert: This article contains heavy discussion of the plot and characters of Supergiant Games’ Transistor. I should state now, as a white person who can pass very easily (despite wishing I didn’t) as a straight woman, I have a lot of privilege. I had a lot of privilege before […]
It’s election day here in the United States! Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken opens the way I open most conversations with games scholars: with a discussion of the idea of a game. What even is a game, anyway? Where she differs here from most, however, is that instead of discussing […]
I spend a lot of time, much more time than I should, thinking about just what games are. Not what they mean to us, though also that, but what they are, where they begin and end, and what place we the players have in considerations of games. This is a […]
We’ve been grappling, the past couple weeks, with a game called Bound, and we’ve been particularly struck by the game’s ambiguous narrative and by its surreal landscapes. And something we continue to ask ourselves is–what is the purpose of the conversation between the two, between the narrative and the gameworld? […]
As we’ve talked about on the podcast, Sam and I have both been reading Katherine Isbister’s How Games Move Us, but while she’s been open chatty, I’ve been reserving my thoughts. For me, there’s a lot to wrestle with, because the book directly engages with a lot of ideas I’ve […]
I’ll be blunt: I didn’t want to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but with the controversy around the game’s engagement with/appropriation of (depending on whom you ask) racial issues and activist movements, it’s an essential experience for someone looking for the human in the code. Mankind Divided promised humanity in […]
On the way to the (final!) Games+Learning+Society conference last week, my friend and co-presenter Tony and I were talking about hard games, and failure. We focused on how games were organized during the arcade era, around the lives bought with a quarter and how this helped shape not only games, […]
In response to a 2014 essay in First Person Scholar by Miguel Penabella, Jim Gee said, “For me, what makes a video game good is a loving marriage between game mechanics and content,” a simple statement that feels like a summary of much of the ludic theory we work with […]
CW for sexual violence in this post, and some of the content may be considered NSFW. Earlier this week, Compulsion Games’ released a preview version of We Happy Few, the nightmarish dystopian game set in a drug-fueled alternate-reality 1960s England. As this game speaks to everything I love—weird visual styles, […]
This exploration of feminist games studies is a continuation—begin with part one here. Alisha: I think if we want to talk about the need for feminist games studies, we also have to take a minute to consider—briefly—the history of games studies, and maybe also the points at which feminist research […]
As most readers are no doubt aware, Pokemon Go has swept the world. Despite having a terrible interface, completely unreliable servers, no tutorial or manual, and limited creativity in gameplay, many, many people still find the game absolutely enjoyable. I myself have spent hours and hours every day since I […]