Games and Culture
337 posts
Like many people, when I first started playing Forgotten Anne it felt like I was playing inside of a Studio Ghibli film. The game is a cinematic adventure platformer that contains beautifully illustrated graphics, amazing and adaptive choregraphed music and seamless animations. At many times it looks and feels like […]
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 […]
This game packs an emotional punch and easily carries on the legacy of Life is Strange’s heavy themes and tenuous emotional choices.
I recently watched two TEDTalks. The first was titled ‘Why tech needs the humanities’ (2017) and was presented by Eric Berridge, the cofounder of BlueWolf, an IBM company. The second was ‘Teach arts and sciences together’ (2002) presented by Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut. While neither are exclusively […]
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 […]
In many games, mental disorders are very much defined as auxiliary to the characters within the game. They are used to derive a sort of mechanic and are ignored narratively as they relate to character development and seriously dealing with these topics. Games like Amnesia, Don’t Starve, and The Evil […]
Video games allow us to play in the realm of the macabre. We can be monsters, killers, and super villains. We can exist in worlds that are full of human wreckage, zombies, death, decay. Like our fascination with post-apocalyptic movies and books, video games allow us to explore countless realms […]
Sometimes being a teacher means you have to have some tough conversations with your students. I think of them as dialogue wheel options, Bioware RPG style, when I’m standing in front of my freshman writing class. Every day my options light up depending on the topic to be taught, the […]
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 […]
Note: I used an italicized ‘Orwell’ when talking about the game as a whole and ‘Orwell’ when talking about specifics of the governmental program within the game. Over break I bought a game called Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You. I had never heard of this game before but it […]
Episode 165: Thunderbird Strike and the Power of Indigenous Game Design: A Conversation with Elizabeth Lapensee (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we had an amazing conversation with the fabulous Elizabeth LaPensee, Indigenous scholar, artist, and game designer who talks with us […]
While I have long been a fan and observer of cosplay and the cosplay community, it has only been two years since I have started to do cosplay myself and in that time I have cosplayed as Ezio Auditore, Korra, a female Loki, and a female Negan. The majority of the experiences […]
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 […]