I’m going to blame it on some kind of virus induced delirium, but last night I sat on my couch nursing a cold, sipping a hot tea, and watching the Game Awards. Mind you I never watch the game awards. I think the judging is biased and the host(s) usually […]
representation
44 posts
I’ve written a couple posts on Rise of the Tomb Raider already because I’ve been playing the game a lot lately, and while I’ve been playing, I’ve also been watching Jessica Jones on Netflix. As a result of my concurrent engagement with both, I’ve been thinking that the two seem to […]
I’ve been playing more Rise of the Tomb Raider this week, and in the course of my doing so, I’ve been thinking more about the manner in which parenthood is represented in the game. And there are two characters, specifically, whose roles in the game, whose relationships and interactions with […]
Alisha recently alerted me to a piece making the rounds on Facebook called “Ghoul, You’ll Be a Woman Soon: Supernatural Puberty and the Horror of Periods,” in which Emalie Soderback discusses a subgenre of film that she likes to call “supernatural-period-girl-horror.” Soderback begins this examination by laying its foundations: Rosemary’s […]
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 […]
My parents came out to visit last weekend, and while they were here, my mom and I played through the first few hours of Until Dawn together. As we played, I was reminded of the fact that, growing up (and still), I often bonded with my mom over horror movies, […]
As I mentioned during our latest episode of the NYMG podcast, I’ve been playing Until Dawn, and the game has got me thinking about a few different things that I’d like to spend some time parsing through, like the game’s representation of things like gender and race, how it is that […]
Update: Several of our readers have reached out to us about the title of this post, and I wanted to make sure that their voices are heard and that we take the opportunity to begin a conversation about it by addressing their concerns. Here is one such email we received, […]
As you may know, we are currently seeking funding in support of our project Invisibility Blues, a critical video series exploring race and representation in games, and with just over a week to go in the Kickstarter campaign, we have created a teaser video showcasing some of the type of […]
This past week, I’ve been catching up on reading Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, and a series of questions that Shaw asks in the second chapter (entitled “Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft?: Unpacking Identification in Video Games”) […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cliché of the grizzled, brown-haired hero, wondering just what it is that keeps them at the top of the game-protagonist heap, and what encourages designers to keep on designing them. I’ve been thinking about these men, so similar, and about Lee Everett […]
I’ve been doing a lot of research in the past months into representation in video games, particularly gender representation, with a few forays into racial representation. As a woman who prefers to play as a woman whenever possible, this is an issue close to my heart, and it’s one that […]
With the release of the upgraded State of Decay Year One Survival Edition just around the corner, it seemed a good time to revisit the original game, which I explored at length over the months after release in terms of realism and representation (as well as gameplay and mechanics). At […]
In the first of what we hope will be a robust series, we present a critically focused Let’s Play of the second episode of Dontnod Entertainment’s Life Is Strange, in which we explore representation, characterization, mechanics, branching narratives, and choice lines from two very different playthroughs.
Recently, LEGO rejected a LEGO Ideas submission featuring the women of the Supreme Court, citing LEGO’s rule of not engaging with current politics. On one hand, I see their point; I don’t really want political LEGO sets, and I can certainly think of more than a few politicians that I […]
Last week, I wrote about the revelation that Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard was originally conceived as a woman, at least in visuals (not necessarily in terms of game content), a piece that sparked a bit of discussion on my Facebook page about the nature of the industry and reality. “Reality” […]