This past week came with the release of three big (and much awaited…for me) titles, Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and Wolfenstein II. Most of us are well aware of the uproar surrounding Wolfenstein II before its release. Certain segments of the internet were irrationally angry about the idea […]
Yearly Archives: 2017
143 posts
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 […]
This week has brought us tons of new game releases. We can solve grisly murder mysteries co-operatively in Hidden Agenda, punch Nazis in Wolfenstein II, explore Egypt as a man of color in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and finally be a dinosaur (and just about anything else) in Super Mario Odyssey. […]
In my last post, I wrote a bit about the implications that motherhood and maternal thinking have for the rendering of the protagonist Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn. Since then, I’ve been thinking more about the construction of female protagonists, especially since I’ve started reading Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s […]
Episode 161: Podcast, Please!: On Podcasts and the Problem of “Cool” Scholarship (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk about doing podcasts (and other non-traditional work) as a form of scholarship and what that means for us as academics and members […]
The magic circle is an interesting place. This is particularly true when looking at values, morality, and consequences for our actions. By Huizinga’s definition of the magic circle, things that happen in a game cannot have consequences in our daily lives. This is why, despite many similarities, school isn’t a […]
Yesterday, the news that EA was shutting down Visceral Games and passing off their developing Star Wars title in order to shape it into something else dominated a great deal of community discussion. As more details emerged, one thing became clear: for EA, at least, with their “games as service” […]
In the most recent issue of ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology, Joseph Reagle published a really interesting article called “Naive Meritocracy and the Meanings of Myth.” Meritocracies are something I’ve been studying since early in my graduate career. They fascinate me, because they should work; yet, […]
Episode 160: Dad Jokes & Spooky Corn: A Halloween Special (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk our favorite horror games and films as well as other gaming experiences that scared us (even if they weren’t supposed to be scary). It’s a […]
Since I began studying my online Mafia community, I’ve been doing a lot of wider reading in technical communication, looking at foundational texts to fill in around things I’d studied before. It’s meant digging into the backlog of articles and books I’d put off—the pile of “read later” items always threatening to […]
I recently started playing Monster Hunter Stories on the 3DS. I originally thought that it was just the kind of a game that could tide you over until Monster Hunter World comes out in January, but man, this game is fun! I don’t think I’ve had this much fun playing a game in a […]
Friends, we are coming together as a community to do our next charity marathon (a little early I know) to raise funds for the people of Puerto Rico after the devastation that they suffered during Hurricane Maria. We will be streaming in shifts for 24 hours on Saturday, October 7, […]
When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to learn more about how the community functioned, my project was […]
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. […]
Episode 159: Some People Just Need Killing: A Conversation with Hazel Monforton on Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we talk with Hazel Monforton about her work as a writer on Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider […]
The trajectory of the Dishonored series is a fascinating one. In the original game, players took on the role of Corvo Attano, while in the associated DLCs, the playable center shifted to the assassin Daud. The sequel then offered players the choice of Corvo or his daughter Emily. Now, with Death […]