Episode 155: Rebooting Boyhood and Playing Games For Girls: A Conversation with Carly Kocurek (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we have a conversation with Carly Kocurek, author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering […]
Games and Gender
34 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 […]
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
I spent a lot of time looking at diversity in State of Decay and its re-release, from actually counting and coding bodies to considering the feeling of a game driven by the kinds of characters who don’t normally lead stories. Results were mixed; the game, while much stronger than many […]
One of the things I enjoy most about writing for Not Your Mama’s Gamer is the sense of anticipation I get when a new game I feel particularly passionate about is released. There are always games to write about, of course, but something about knowing that a game I’ve been […]
Last week, I was at an academic conference, presenting on a game I and a colleague created for classroom use. It’s a big conference, and I got to listen to a lot of very smart scholars hold forth on all the things I’m interested in, from first-year writing to games […]
I’ve written about coming out as trans before, and I suspect this won’t be the last time I write about it either. Not necessarily because I love talking about my own experiences, but because of the nature of coming out as a constant experience, something that never truly happens once. […]
I spent my Christmas up in Minnesota visiting my parents. I didn’t grow up in the small town where they currently reside, as we moved around a lot thanks to my Dad being in the Navy, but their new house still has all of the pictures and knick-knacks I saw […]
The following article may contain spoilers for Final Fantasy XV and its surrounding universe. So Final Fantasy XV came out last week. Honestly, by now, it should be no mystery that I’m probably one of the least excited people in the world about that. Though I tried to keep my […]
I’m currently only about halfway through the main storyline of Pokemon Moon, despite picking it up the day it was released. Most of this is due to my end of semester schedule, which is a series of late nights and endless cups of coffee, but I still have plenty of […]
A note: I’ve only played through on low chaos with Emily so far, so while I’ve read about high chaos choices and Corvo playthroughs, I speak from the vantage of only intimately knowing my own adventure to reclaim Emily’s throne. Note also: spoilers here! When Emily was revealed as the […]
“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal On the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Sunday November 20th, NYMG Writers Lee Hibbard and Jynx Boyne met at an event on Purdue University Campus. The two of them wrote reflections […]
Bianca: In light of the election, the two of us have found ourselves returning to the conversations we have had on building feminist coalitions–that is, we have found ourselves reflecting on both the consistent, perpetual need for such work and the challenges that result from embarking on such work. Previously, […]
I’ve been reading Patricia Melzer’s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought, and as a result I’ve been revisiting the ways feminist science fiction and video games converse and intersect. In the past, I’ve interrogated this conversation by specifically examining the different ways motherhood is represented in feminist science fiction […]
This might sound blasphemous, but the women in Mafia III and Luke Cage fascinate me most. These women are simultaneously complex and maddeningly shallow. I say this to mean there is centuries of tears, laughter, abuse, and love tied up in each and every one of them, but at the same […]
For the marathon this past weekend (remember: you can still donate!), I played Hearthstone and then Left 4 Dead 2, and for the first time in the long hours I’ve put into the latter, I did not invert the controls. For years, I’ve been inverting Y axes in dozens of […]