Since we’ve been discussing Her Story again lately, I went back and replayed the beginning. The game initially seeds the player with four videos tagged with the keyword “murder,” and since the gameplay is built solely from searching keywords, I catalogued all the major options in these early videos, omitting articles and […]
Design and Development
106 posts
This week, with the release of LEGO Dimensions, I’ve been thinking a lot about LEGO and cost. One of my favorite things about LEGO is the built in constraints: there are only so many pieces and colors to choose from. This is why I get such joy from a really […]
Spoilers abound; content warnings as well for sexual violence and torture. There’s been a lot of discussion about the “male gaze” around Quiet, the mute female sniper in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, and it’s a phrase we’ve employed here a number of times in talking about video […]
I have decided that I am no longer going to solely be a consumer of games, and I’m going to start making them. I have made one game in the past, called Aquaville Adventures, made in Kodu Games Lab, which is a free program by Microsoft. I loved it. I […]
As you may know, we are currently seeking funding in support of our project Invisibility Blues, a critical video series exploring race and representation in games, and with just over a week to go in the Kickstarter campaign, we have created a teaser video showcasing some of the type of […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cliché of the grizzled, brown-haired hero, wondering just what it is that keeps them at the top of the game-protagonist heap, and what encourages designers to keep on designing them. I’ve been thinking about these men, so similar, and about Lee Everett […]
Back in May Electronic Arts announced that it would feature female soccer players in its popular FIFA game series, starting with the upcoming FIFA 16. According to the release statement, the game will feature 12 international woman’s teams. Many were also excited to learn that the women would not be […]
No More Heroes, created by the enigmatic Suda51, is arguably one of the most entertaining action-adventure/hack-n-slash franchises to ever hit the Wii. The game follows Travis, an aspiring assassin whose dream is to fight his way through the United Assassins Association until he is number one. Admittedly, I was a […]
After this year’s E3 I thought that it would be fun to look back at one of my posts about last year’s E3 and the status of women in games. Last year we were talking about Aisha Tyler’s claim that female NPCs in games increased diversity in games and Anita […]
Since its release, I’ve spent a lot of time playing, and thinking about, Sam Barlow’s Her Story. I’ve played it on my own Steam account, and also on my husband’s — I didn’t want to interrupt my own game, which was then unfinished, but I did want to see if […]
Another E3 has quickly come and gone, and as I reflect back on the hours I spent watching conferences and live streams from the show floor, hunting down gameplay video, and reading the latest gaming news and updates, I can’t help but think that this year was notably different from […]
I’ve been a fan of the Fallout franchise for some time now. I have very fond memories of exploring the desolate outskirts of Washington D.C. with my well read super mutant companion, Fawkes. In Fallout: New Vegas, I would often take pleasure in observing the rolling desert from the dinosaur […]
The recent NYMG piece on Sam’s reaction to the new Cuphead trailer has inspired a lot of reaction of its own about the game, the animation style that influenced it, and what it means to critique a trailer, and so for the purpose of further discussion and analysis, we have […]
We joked several times on the last episode of the podcast that this was going to be the year of the 4 at E3. We were all anticipating 2nds, 3rds, or 4ths of some series or another and that held up for the most part. One of the things that […]
A few weeks ago, Polygon editor Arthur Gies published his review on The Witcher 3, an action-based role-playing game developed by CD Projekt RED and based on the Polish fantasy novel of the same name. Though Gies’ review was largely positive and although he still admitted that The Witcher 3 […]
Though there have been some great strides in the presentation of empowered female characters in videogames, developers still have a long way to go. In a recent dialogue with Samantha Blackmon and Alisha Karabinus about female characters who fall short of their potential, we found ourselves asking why narratives and […]