We had our most recent Gaming for Good marathon last weekend, during which I played a few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn. And also last weekend, the series Orphan Black had its final episode. Both Orphan Black and Horizon Zero Dawn deal with cloning, motherhood, and technology, so I’ve been thinking […]
motherhood
18 posts
The fifth and final season of Orphan Black began a couple weeks ago. It’s a show about human clones—about how being a clone might impact both one’s personal identity and one’s relationship to others (that is, one’s potential roles as sister, daughter, mother, partner). But more than that, the show […]
When thinking about the ways motherhood comes to be framed in games, some questions that often come to mind are–how do games represent motherhood? What assumptions, biases, and social norms are games manifesting? Are they perpetuating normative, patriarchal constructions of motherhood? Or are some games working to complicate such constructions? […]
I ended my blog post last week with some lingering questions I still have about the representation of single motherhood as a destructive and dysfunctional force in The Park, which doesn’t feel like a particularly satisfying way to wrap up my examination of the game. So I want to spend […]
Last week, I interrogated manifestations of single moms and mental health in Stranger Things and The Park, but I wanted to take some more time to think about how such representations occur across the horror genre. In other words, I find myself continuing to ask—what kinds of patterns do we […]
Last month, I wrote about the ways feminist science fiction reimagines motherhood and the ways this reimagining of maternal power highlights the limitations in video games’ (often fraught) depictions of motherhood. Lately, after watching Stranger Things, I’ve been thinking particularly about articulations of single motherhood, how it is single mothers […]
I’ve been catching up on a lot of reading this summer, and much of what I’ve been reading engages with the complexities of family structures and kinship ties. From Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina to Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, from Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats to Toni Morrison’s […]
Alisha and Ashley brought a game called Who’s Your Daddy to my attention this week. According to Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku, “Who’s Your Daddy is an early access multiplayer game. One person plays as the dad, and another person can play as the baby. The baby has but one goal: to […]
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the construction of motherhood in Alien: Isolation and Among the Sleep, and since then, I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and thinking a lot about how parenthood is constructed in this game as well. Indeed, it would seem that, […]
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, […]
Moms have it rough, man. I’m talking socially, of course, considering the fact that the United States is only one of two countries in the world that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers. (Get it together, United States.) But I’m also talking representationally, and it is this particular […]
So it’s no secret that I have a penchant for Kickstarter projects. I have backed more projects that make the geek world more accessible to children in general and girls in particular than I care to remember, everything from flash cards, to games (board and video), to graphic novels, and […]
Let me start by saying the it has long been my secret shame that I have never finished a Legend of Zelda game. There, I said it, I feel better now. It’s out in the open. I feel that I can now move on with my recovery. It’s not that […]
Episode 55: Mommy Dearest: A Mother’s Day Tribute to Mamas Who Game With Their Kids (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) The episode where we hear from mothers who game with their children (in myriad ways). We are joined this week by Jennifer, the mother of our […]
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 […]
Episode 18: Quick and Dirty: Free Games and Extra Life (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we have sick kids and co-hosts so we did a quick podcast to choose the winner of the copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and run down […]