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 […]
#YesIPlay
32 posts
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 […]
I was very excited to see Critical Distance’s Blog of the Round Table theme this month, because (1) I’d been itching to write about Destiny 2 and this gives me the perfect chance and (2) I think this is an absolutely fascinating topic that I hadn’t thought nearly enough about. […]
A lot of people are asking me why I haven’t written about the racist slur employed by PewDiePie recently. I already did and so have many others. The perpetual use of the n-word within gaming isn’t fueled by neo-Nazi ideology and didn’t emerge with the election of Donald Trump. You can’t […]
I was chatting with some of the NYMG folks the other day, and it occurred to me that everyone, even game scholars, need to be reminded of the value of making time for play. This summer I’ve been playing a ton of sports (mostly disc golf), but I haven’t been […]
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 Saturday, March 11th, my roommate, Nico, and I took part in the Gaming for Good 24 hour livestream. This time, we were raising money for the American Civil Liberties Union, and we met our initial goal (We’re still taking donations till March 31st, however, if you still want to […]
I sit at my dining room table, surrounded by hand-drawn maps and coloured pencils. My laptop is open to Discord, where my friends pester me with questions. They send me detailed descriptions of character history, ask about dragons and gods, allies and enemies. I have books open to carefully calculated […]
So my gaming has been quelled a bit by a freak accident. I somehow managed to take a sizable chunk of my thumb out with a bottle opener. I will spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that even the ER nurse was impressed by my incredible […]
Because it is terrifyingly easy to lure me into anything related to attempted organization, I’ve recently made a bullet journal. The idea is simple: a self-designed journal/planner that allows more flexibility than a traditional planner (something I’ve never been able to keep). I keep to-do lists, and notes, and love […]
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 […]
When it comes to performance, I’m something of a jack of all trades. I’ve studied music, theatre, and dance, and even though writing took the front seat on the bus of my vocational life, I can still shake off my mental cobwebs enough to play each of the four instruments […]
Trigger Warning: This article contains descriptions of suicide attempts and depressive episodes. This article contains spoilers for Undertale’s Neutral and True Pacifist Route. — There’s a kid sitting on the roof of a house. They’re only two stories up, but they think they’re high enough. They’ve been up there for […]
This weekend, my mother came to visit me in my new town, and we managed to get a lot of play time in even while exploring the new town. We played with LEGO, which mostly involved repairing her LEGO camper that had suffered heavy damage during its last trip; my mother […]
I haven’t played an MMORPG since 2010, when I allowed my World of Warcraft account to lapse, or at least I hadn’t until recently, when I had to spend a week playing for a class. Rather than start a new account, I picked up the subscription where I’d left off, […]
Lately I’ve been wondering just what game culture is anymore. I’m a member of a number of gaming groups in my professional life, in my hobbies, and across the Internet, and conversations are never just restricted to games. In generally feminist/gamer spaces, conversations skew all over the place; in our […]