Last October, Sega released Alien: Isolation, and much of the discussion around the game has dealt with its pacing, its level of difficulty, its relationship and faithfulness to the film franchise, and whether or not the game is successfully scary. Relatively little discussion has occurred, however, regarding the manner in […]
Monthly Archives: May 2015
41 posts
I had a little extra time this week, so I thought I would take a risk and buy a new game without more than the most cursory glance at information. I chose Lifeless Planet because the cover was fascinating. I didn’t know what kind of game it was or anything […]
You’re the lone occupant in a desolate hotel reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel, the haunted building in Stephen King’s The Shining. The corridors appear to stretch on forever and ever, growing longer with each and every step. Is it a trick of the mind? Your stomach plummets as a winged figure zooms at you from down the hall, shattering the […]
Miguel Sicart defines games as systems “in which the rules force the player to face ethical dilemmas, or in which the rules themselves raise ethical issues.” The game rules force players to interact in specific ways in order to confront ethical issues. In this manner, Life is Strange asks players to […]
Episode 101: Rage On Fleek: On Choice Feminism and Diverse Identities (Right click and save as to download, or hit us up on iTunes or Stitcher) The episode where we talk about “Choice Feminism” and how we understand what it means and what the implications of it are. Discussions of the […]
With summer break looming and with my daughter’s (Pea) recent discovery of Stampy Cat’s Terraria Let’s Plays (thanks to the research that I was doing for an earlier NYMG piece) there has been a lot of Terraria going on in my house. Oddly enough very little playing of the game has […]
It’s been 25 days since I gained early access to State of Decay Year One Survival Edition. We don’t get a ton of review codes around here; as a smaller site with a focus a little to the left of traditional gaming sites, we’re not exactly a standard destination for reviews, […]
Convention season is upon us and though what are arguably two of the most popular and publicized pop culture conventions in the United States – San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) and Anime Expo – are still a few months away, now is the time when I start to see a […]
As women, we are taught from a young age to fear the unknown. It is our responsibility to avoid dark alleys, short skirts, abusive men, or any other abnormal and risky behavior. Today people are too savvy about political correctness to say some of these things out loud; ie. you […]
If I hadn’t discovered roleplaying, I wouldn’t have known what it was that set my ever-restless soul afire. I considered myself a serious writer at the delicate age of seven and, having come to this realization at such an early age, I carefully consumed and documented the world much like […]
It’s early in the morning and I have yet to have coffee, but I promise I’m not crazy. I know that I have never been a fan of gamification (and I can promise that this isn’t a post about gamification itself, though we’ve done that a lot in the past) […]
I’ve been doing a lot of research in the past months into representation in video games, particularly gender representation, with a few forays into racial representation. As a woman who prefers to play as a woman whenever possible, this is an issue close to my heart, and it’s one that […]
Sometimes it really is about ethics—or is it? GamerGate members (ostensibly) launched a site this week called Deep Freeze, which, in their own words, aims to serve as “a journalism reference resource, conceived to supply a reader with easy-digestible[sic] information to determine the reliability of an individual writer or outlet.” […]
100 episodes and four and a half years and last weekend was a damned near perfect way to commemorate it. We all got together and played video games and just chatted and then followed that up with an awesome conversation about video games, tech, and feminism with Brianna Wu of Giant […]
The winner of the State of Decay YOSE Giveaway is Nate Kiernan (@MrNinjaSquirrel), who also runs his own games review site, Kritiqal. Maybe we’ll see a review of State of Decay YOSE there soon as well! Congrats, Nate, and have fun slaying some zombies!
I recently finished playing through Killbrite Studio’s Among the Sleep (2014), and after falling through a wormhole of online reviews, blog posts, and comment sections regarding people’s reviews and interpretations of the game, I have been thinking quite a lot about the representation of children, children-heroes, and children-victims in video games. […]