This week we are revealing a new design for NYMG. The all-new and very apropos characterizations of the staff have been drawn by the wonderfully talented artist, Alyse Allred, so we thought this would also be a great opportunity to introduce the NYMG community to Alyse as well. You can find […]
R&D
18 posts
So this has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks now, but I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and write about it. When the thought first came to me I wanted to write about Aisha Tyler’s comments about the increased numbers of female […]
Let me start by saying that I have not entirely been following the so-dubbed Spaklegate fiasco closely. Mostly what I’ve seen are hurt reactions by people who cared about what things like sparkleponies was doing for people, particularly for graduate students. It made us feel comfortable, and it let incoming […]
I play games…a lot of games, but games are what I research. When I am researching a game I play the whole game. I have to finish it. Don’t get me wrong, I may not 100% percent it and I may use a game guide (very rarely) if I get […]
In the last couple of months I have been thinking a lot about games research artifacts. I’m not even sure if that’s the best thing to call them but it’s what I’m running with for now. While conferencing this summer I had a handheld game system stolen from a hotel […]
There was a thoughtful response to my last post, Female Game Protagonists: Engendering Power Through Assemblages. I wanted to respond in the comment section, but it got a little out of control and just became another post. If you missed the last post, it was about using the idea of […]
Ok, so this blog starts to get a little fancy-pantsy (AKA: academicy). So bear with me. So what does it mean to be an assemblage? As many of you may know, assemblages as a term is popular in OOO and in Latour’s writing. But you also may know, I have […]
Story in video games is one of those controversial topics, though no video game would exist, let alone be successful, without story. Some of the very first debates about video games, arguments that would eventually become the foundation of Game Studies as a field, were about narratology and ludology, or […]
What is a gamer? This question is at the center of what it means to study women or feminism in games. It is in this label of “gamer” that we are most often excluded. Of course we couldn’t be “gamers” because girls don’t play games, they don’t play real games, […]
What does it mean to call a game a companion? Referring to a story, or a favorite fictional character, as a companion seems easy enough to understand. I imagine that most of us had our own fantasy worlds growing up, where we were Peter Pan or Dorothy, or Falcor. We […]
This is a visualization based on word frequency. It has not been adjusted in any way. For my diss, I am using a two-pronged approach for analyzing gaming industry company policy. The first is a hermenuetic analysis and the second is a visual analysis. Using various methods of data visualization […]
For those who may have missed our last podcast, we had an incredible interview with author Christa Charter. In the interview, Charter narrates the struggle between portraying a female protagonist who is sexual, and likes her sexuality, and one who is a slut. She found in her research that there […]
So we have just returned from the fabulous GLS (Games, Learning, ad Society) Conference at UW Madison. It is really a great conference: a good mix of professionals from industry, developers, academics, researchers, and K-12 teachers; lots of good tech to check out and play with (as anyone who got […]
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 […]
Sheri Graner Ray, author (Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding The Market) and game designer, has written a new post over at Fem IRL on hiring folks based on whether or not they fit in and how that leads to companies hiring people who are just like their current employee base. […]
Guilt has finally gotten the better of me. It has been too long since I posted a real post. I have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes lately and was really feeling like a slacker. Then I asked myself the big question…how is that any different from […]