As we prepare to write this, we sit in silence, simultaneously furious and sad. Sad because a woman we would like to call a comrade-in-arms has met with a huge injustice and furious because we live and work in a community that not only makes that kind of injustice possible, […]
Monthly Archives: March 2016
23 posts
A few days ago, a user posted in the Overwatch Beta feedback section of the Blizzard forums that they were uncertain about one of Tracer’s victory poses in the game, a version of the infamous butt pose. User Fipps didn’t seem to have an issue with other characters who posed […]
Invisibility Blues is back and this time we’re rounding out character creation by moving from the general to the specific by asking if we can find — or create — ourselves in the games we play. Don’t forget to check out our Invisibility Blues page here on NYMG for the first video in […]
I’m currently writing my dissertation, a process that is simultaneously going better and worse than I anticipated. Writing the dissertation, it seems, brings a lot of my anxieties to the forefront. Finishing the dissertation is symbolic of leaving my program and community, leaving grad school (and my identity as a […]
As a mother, a gamer, and a change agent I am starting to find myself more and more in the position of having to explain why we don’t do certain things that other people do. When my daughter was an infant I made the decision that Disney princesses would not […]
Games are alive with emotion. Maybe that emotion is excitement at finding a new piece of legendary gear, or aggression at trying to kill a particularly difficult boss, or sadness when a character dies (what, you’ve never cried during a video game? No? Yeah, yeah… me either…). One of the […]
Recently, I wrote about the presentation of illness and injury in The Flame in the Flood, and as I’ve played more of that game, I found myself thinking about the visuals of effort. In some games, you can run forever, no matter how many dozens of pounds of gear you’re […]
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 […]
Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to have many productive conversations about LEGO Serious Play and composing in the classroom. These conversations have led me to thinking more about what it means to compose through LEGO, specifically how does working with LEGO bricks help us propose a solution to a problem, […]
In my continued efforts to see the end of war, I’ve kept with playing This War of Mine: The Little Ones. In my last post I mentioned that the major draw of this game (for me at least) is the often neglected story that other games like Call of Duty, Ghost […]
Episode 122: Where the River Takes Us: A Conversation with Gwen Frey of The Molasses Flood (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). In this episode we talk with Gwen Frey from The Molasses Flood the developers of the new indie survival roguelike (yeah, that’s all kinds […]
I recently came across an article entitled “Between the Lines: Games and Diegesis,” in which Ian McCamant interrogates the manner in which games tell stories and the manner in which they tell stories differently than literature or film. And since these are subjects I usually find myself engaging with, McCamant’s […]
Story Time: I sit, staring at the intro screen to, of all things, Pokemon Y. I’ve been here for maybe 10 minutes, staring at a very simple question that Professor Sycamore asked, that every Professor of Pokemon Studies always asks right at the beginning of the game. “Are you a […]
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 […]
I’ve been writing about Nevermind for the past couple of years and still I keep coming back to it. Nevermind is particularly intriguing to me because the game combines horror and psychological suspense with biofeedback in an attempt to create a game that could possibly help players manage their anxieties. […]
As a child sick days, for me, meant laying feverishly on the couch at my grandmother’s house watching cartoons on what now seems to be a ridiculously small black and white TV. There was orange juice, chicken soup (or Vernor’s ginger ale if I had a tummy bug), and a […]