I have had a thing for horror and suspense involving corn fields long before I literally moved to the middle of one 17 years ago. It started when I was in high school huddled together with my best friend in her basement watching the film Children of the Corn (1984). Children […]
Yearly Archives: 2017
143 posts
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 […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried like hell to get my hands on game scripts and bibles. After assessing the lack of good informational texts and examples for students interested in writing games, or writing for game studios, I couldn’t think of a more pressing need or a bigger […]
“[T]he content of their character” is a phrase that almost everyone is familiar with even if they are not quite sure why. “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but […]
Consentacle is a card game created by Naomi Clark that focuses on trust, intimacy, and communication between two players. It’s currently live on Kickstarter and at the time of writing is more than 100% funded. The game has been floating around in prototype form for a couple of years and […]
Episode 158: The Two Jaakko Problem: The Problem of Representation in Game Studies (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we chat about the perils and pitfalls of having a particular history of a the field of game studies laid out in a journal […]
Patchwork is a beautiful board game designed by Uwe Rosenberg, with game art by Klemenz Franz. While this game doesn’t fit into my mission to play, review, and critique all of the top 30 games on Board Game Geek as part of my Critical Perspectives on Board Games series (so […]
Spoiler alert: This post contains some spoilers for Nier: Automata. I suggest playing through ending E before reading to avoid any spoilers. My partner, Alex, is home, and that means we can finally start chipping away at the ever-increasing backlog of games that I collected over the year that he was […]
I wonder how differently my parents and my parents’ parents saw the world as adults compared to me. I grew up digital, and now in my early 30s, I spend a lot of time contemplating my relationship with technology and the physical realm. Every couple years I feel this need […]
This past Saturday night, after a long summer hiatus, I sat down at my desk with my dice and my computer and ran a session of my digital Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shards of Aeridas. The game lasted five hours, all of which I spent frantically typing into chat windows […]
Episode 157: Navigating Spaces: Being Together In and Through Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we chat about always online games that don’t offer a single player experience. We talk about the positives and negatives (and the in-betweens) of this newly (?) […]
We had our most recent Gaming for Good marathon last weekend, during which I played a few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn. And also last weekend, the series Orphan Black had its final episode. Both Orphan Black and Horizon Zero Dawn deal with cloning, motherhood, and technology, so I’ve been thinking […]
The following contains spoilers for the plot of the Balance Arc of The Adventure Zone. Last week, I spent my Thursday night pacing around my apartment listening to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Adventure Zone. After three years and 69 episodes, the D&D comedy podcast […]
Mansions of Madness is far from the most complicated game I’ve played (I’ve played Food Chain Magnate, ok), though unboxing it was still very intimidating. I’ve certainly never been a “minifig” person, and I know there are those who love that kind of stuff. What most intrigued me about the […]
Representation matters. This is something that we have said countless times. It matters in games, in game development teams, in games communities, and in the world at large (especially in our current political environment). Over the course of the last couple of months we have spent several podcast episodes talking […]
Episode 156 Pizza Party is the Best Party…Oh, and Our Video Game Summer Run Down (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we chat about what we’ve been playing this summer and what we are going to be playing to close the […]