A group of children, ranging from 9 to 10 years old, huddle around a boy. It’s 2003, and the boy is telling them all their assignments for recess. Today’s game is Halo. The boy, obviously the leader in one respect or another, has decided he’s going to be Master Chief. […]
feminism
141 posts
I have been a feminist since I could talk. For better or worse, I have always seen injustice, prejudice, racism, sexism, and unfairness in the world, and it always deeply disturbed me. Of course, I have grown and changed as a feminist. I’ve had to confront ways my privilege has […]
This summer, I’m in a class focused on women in games, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: one step forward, 97,000 steps back at every turn. The success stories—of games, characters, girl gaming clubs, industry professionals, more—are both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because we’re starved for them; terrible because those […]
I’ve been watching the second season of Fargo, which is a great show. The second season is set in the 70’s, so much like Mad Men, the sexism is blindingly obvious, as it was in the first season of Fargo. The portrayals of sexism in both seasons are a bit […]
Because I obviously enjoy being sad, depressed, and/or miserable, I’m going to continue this conversation regarding feminism and war in light of 11 bit studio’s most recent game – This War of Mine: The Little Ones. To have a better grasp of what I’m processing through and digging deeper to understand, […]
In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart addresses issues of moral and ethical choices and how games designed in such a way to draw players into ethical dilemmas, moral reflection, and immersive experiences. This War of Mine: The Little Ones (TWoM), by placing the player into unfamiliar territory and in an unfamiliar role, crafts […]
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, […]
This week, I’ve been reading Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design, a book that, in 2003, outlined some of the challenges the industry was facing in terms of expanding the market and being more welcoming to female gamers. Tracy Lien’s 2013 look at early trends in video game marketing […]
When I was a kid, I had piles of Star Wars figures, including all the Leias a girl could want. I had combat-ready Hoth Leia, I had Leia in a poncho on Endor, and bounty hunter Leia, who was my favorite, because she was just so cool, strolling into Jabba’s […]
I took a feminist methodologies class this past semester, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make use of feminist methodologies in my own work and my own research on games and literature. What seems important when conceptualizing of such thinking and practice is that there […]
I read Jorge Albor’s “The Games I Fear to Play: Reflecting on the Personal in Games” the other day, in which Albor considers the manner in which games represent personal experiences, arguing that games “do a damn good job of instigating self-reflection.” Indeed, Albor believes that it is perfectly “reasonable […]
Somehow I missed this LEGO commercial from last year, but this week Facebook has been showing it to me daily. It’s a good commercial, but not a perfect commercial. The commercial shows a girl playing with LEGO sets as well as creating her own LEGO builds while integrating the creations […]
Another anime season has come and gone and it’s time again to reflect on and discuss some notable series of this past anime season. The Summer 2015 season delivered a wide variety of titles and genres and while not all of my chosen series lived up to their expectations, there […]
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Western approach to menstruation and how it factors into constructions of the ideas of (cis) womanhood, so it seemed like a happy bit of synchronicity when the Lammily doll’s new accessory popped up on my social […]
“If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of the female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalism’s relentless appetite for profit, then sexism […]
Women have been long denied a voice in the gaming industry. This site, and others like it, have been fighting for years to establish a place where women’s voices aren’t only tolerated, but they are central to what it means to talk about games. Just because this site focuses on […]