I hadn’t had a chance to get back to State of Decay 2 for a while, but recently I booted it back up and picked up my community where I’d left off. Right now, I have nine people and only two of them are clearly visually coded as white. In […]
Alisha Karabinus
185 posts
This review contains some mild State of Decay 2 spoilers. I’m not always the fastest player. I like to take my time and explore, and if there are side quests, I will stay distracted forever, following tiny threads and traveling the countryside. I love scrounging things, too, picking flowers, finding […]
At first, I didn’t think I would like State of Decay 2. If you’ve spent any time around here at all, you know the depths of my obsession with the original State of Decay. I put in hundreds of hours, most spent in the Breakdown DLC, building and rebuilding my little patch […]
Since I’ve been writing about game design and the amateur mafia community I’ve been playing with, I’ve noticed more and more how little information there is, in an academic sense, on the processes of game design. A colleague recently came to me for suggestions on behalf of one of her students […]
Late last year, I stumbled across an ad for Mosaic, a film-based interactive story app helmed by film director Steven Soderbergh and starring Sharon Stone. Intrigued, I downloaded it immediately, but I never got very far. At the beginning, at least, “interactivity” seemed nonexistent, and while I appreciated the story for […]
I bought Fallout 4 as a holiday gift for my partner and me back when it released in 2015, but after playing for maybe 45 minutes, I put it aside. Since then, I’ve picked it up a few times, but never for more than one short play session—until late last […]
Yesterday, the news that EA was shutting down Visceral Games and passing off their developing Star Wars title in order to shape it into something else dominated a great deal of community discussion. As more details emerged, one thing became clear: for EA, at least, with their “games as service” […]
Since I began studying my online Mafia community, I’ve been doing a lot of wider reading in technical communication, looking at foundational texts to fill in around things I’d studied before. It’s meant digging into the backlog of articles and books I’d put off—the pile of “read later” items always threatening to […]
When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to learn more about how the community functioned, my project was […]
The trajectory of the Dishonored series is a fascinating one. In the original game, players took on the role of Corvo Attano, while in the associated DLCs, the playable center shifted to the assassin Daud. The sequel then offered players the choice of Corvo or his daughter Emily. Now, with Death […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried like hell to get my hands on game scripts and bibles. After assessing the lack of good informational texts and examples for students interested in writing games, or writing for game studios, I couldn’t think of a more pressing need or a bigger […]
In the 50th year of the journal of College Composition and Communication, in 1999, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams began their essay “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies” with a statement they call aphoristic, but that remains an important reminder we […]
So if you’re surprised I’m writing about the State of Decay 2 footage shown at E3, you don’t know me at all. I didn’t watch the Microsoft show live, and to be honest, I watched most of it at 2x or 4x speed, which I recommend for the amazing faces and […]
Recently I took a survey about places in games and it’s been on my mind ever since. The questions were all about my favorite places in games, but the more I consider the topic, the more I think about important places in games rather than my favorite places – the […]
A few months ago, I wrote about A Normal Lost Phone and the layered experience of inhabiting another through the use of their phone as an empathy device, so when I stumbled upon another game that used a similar approach, I picked it up immediately. But while A Normal Lost […]
As the semester ended, I spent a little time with Crusader Kings II again, as I often do when I have some free time at last. I sink in for a few days and decompress, and then I ignore the game for months. But this time, as I played, I […]