A few weeks ago, episode 145, Sometimes You Have to Kill Things: On Games and Self-Care focused on self care and games. Basically the folks chose the games that they play when everything else seemed to be slightly unbearable. The games to “soothe the soul,” as it were. I wasn’t on that podcast […]
games
17 posts
In last week’s podcast, we talked a bit about agency and feelings of control when watching a movie or TV show versus feeling control while playing a game. Opinions varied, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week. I find that when I watch a movie or TV […]
This weekend, my mother came to visit me in my new town, and we managed to get a lot of play time in even while exploring the new town. We played with LEGO, which mostly involved repairing her LEGO camper that had suffered heavy damage during its last trip; my mother […]
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 […]
In some ways my experience last week could have been the closing scene from a cheesy Disney movie: a girl enters the room and a hush falls across the crowd. The sudden arrival seemed to have fundamentally changed the character of the environment. Except, of course, it wasn’t a ball […]
In an interview published last week on Game Informer, Rhianna Pratchett, writer for the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider and the upcoming game Rise of the Tomb Raider, was questioned about how Lara Croft’s long history of overt over-sexualization and persistent objectification was handled with these latest reboots. For most […]
I hadn’t heard of the episode until the night that it aired. Even then I only noticed it whilst browsing Wednesday’s TV Guide: an episode of Law & Order SVU involving gaming, and, more specifically, violence against women in the gaming industry. My eyebrow was metaphorically raised in interest, but […]
Sometime around the start of the holiday season in 2008 was when I first saw it. Mirror’s Edge had never been on my radar before, but as soon as I saw its advertisement during the commercial breaks of whatever show I had on at the time I became enchanted. Parkour […]
“Why not just review a feminist game?” I was discussing several new games with a friend and trying to decide which one I would write a review for last week, when he asked me that question. At first I thought he was kidding, but he asked again— “No, seriously. It’s […]
At Tuesday’s Gamescom conference, Sony continued to reiterate their support of indie game developers by emphasizing the accessible marketplace that the PS4 will offer for independent publishing. Not to be outdone, and perhaps as another one of their new measures to secure their role as a competitor on the next […]
Power Hour Reviews are a new weekly NYMG feature in which we spend one intense hour playing newly released games in order to get a sense not only of game mechanics and characterization, but narrative as well. Let us spend our time first, so that you don’t have to waste yours. […]
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 […]
Heads up readers, there will be a lot of SPOILERS in what will be my first (and probably least popular) post on NYMG as I’m going to try and convince you that the Mass Effect 3 endings weren’t as horrible as the gaming world seems to think and that changing […]
When did video games start coming with toys in the box? We got used to bonus items in the collectors’ editions of games a long time ago. Hell, we grew to expect them. We’ve gotten maps, figurines, lunchboxes, bobbleheads, and whatnot. I used to snap them up without question, but these […]
We talk about games as social critique quite a bit around here. We ask lots of questions. – Do we learn from games? Yes, lots. Some of it is intentional and some is unintentional. Some is positive and some…not so much. Most obviously we learn about logic puzzles and we […]
On October 5, 2011 the world lost a great technology visionary in Mr. Steve Jobs. His passing was extremely sad but, we must admit, not surprising. I won’t take up time and space extolling the virtues of Mr. Jobs and all of the great things that he did at Apple, Atari, Pixar, […]