This week Sam and Alisha are joined by Kishonna Gray (@kishonnagray) talk about parenting (and being women) while doing the game studies scholar grind.
Games and Gender
34 posts
Content warning: Sexism in historical based games are discussed. Many articles that are linked contain hostile comments. Some of these comments are mentioned or paraphrased. If you visit Total War: Rome II’s Steam page you’ll notice something interesting: Over the past week the reviews for this game have spontaneously […]
This game packs an emotional punch and easily carries on the legacy of Life is Strange’s heavy themes and tenuous emotional choices.
I saw TERA for the first time on the Playstation Network. Though originally released in 2011 the MMORPG was ported to North American consoles this March. The game is developed by Bluehole Studio based in South Korea, which is important to note for several reasons. The first is that, though […]
Or… What would a game studies talk look like if I didn’t cite any hetero white cismen OR work from after 2006. Because when I say intersectional feminist game studies I also think part of the path forward is developing better inter-generational critical game studies.
Vampires do not appear to hold the same appeal in media as they once did, but why? Portraying and playing with our deepest fears, not least of which is death—or worse, becoming the monster ourselves—some of these creatures spent the ‘90s, the aughts, and the first half of the 20-teens struggling with what they are, striving to reconcile their monstrosity with the human they long to still be, and, typically, falling in love with human women.
When The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt came out in 2015, critics and fans alike hailed the game as a video game standard-setter because of its stellar graphics, entertaining gameplay design, deft voice acting, and engrossing narrative. Jonathan Leack of Game Revolution called the game “one of the largest worlds […]
Women as reward. It’s an unfortunately common sexist practice I see in many of the video games I have played and the video games I have seen marketed. Rewarding players with women, all women – not just those that are cisgendered, is equally problematic. While games use women and women’s […]
CW: Visual depictions of sexism and violence As the semester kicks off, I’ve been doing a lot of reading for a class I’m teaching for the first time called Communicating Through New Media. The class covers a wide range of topics relating to how to most effectively communicate through new […]
A couple of months ago I picked up the Crash Bandicoot N’Sane Trilogy, remastered by Vicarious Visions for PS4. I was pretty excited to play through Naughty Dog’s original claim to fame, since I skipped over the PS1 generation as a kid and never had the change to play through […]
Spoiler Warning: The ending of several Legend of Zelda games up to Skyward Sword are going to be disclosed. I will unfortunately not be discussing Breath of the Wild in this article, as I have yet to play the game and I am attempting to avoid plot elements so I […]
In this piece, we analyze the recent new footage from The Last of Us Part II, and include a graphic breakdown of violence enacted in the footage, particularly violence against women. If you’d like to watch the footage for yourself, you may find it here. Sony’s show at Paris Games Week was […]
In the most recent issue of ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology, Joseph Reagle published a really interesting article called “Naive Meritocracy and the Meanings of Myth.” Meritocracies are something I’ve been studying since early in my graduate career. They fascinate me, because they should work; yet, […]
I recently started playing Monster Hunter Stories on the 3DS. I originally thought that it was just the kind of a game that could tide you over until Monster Hunter World comes out in January, but man, this game is fun! I don’t think I’ve had this much fun playing a game in a […]
The following contains spoilers for the plot of the Balance Arc of The Adventure Zone. Last week, I spent my Thursday night pacing around my apartment listening to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Adventure Zone. After three years and 69 episodes, the D&D comedy podcast […]
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 […]