This week, I was re-reading Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perception,” and I had one of those revelatory moments that come only when you’ve read something a million times already, when you have absorbed and understood it and are free to […]
Monthly Archives: January 2017
20 posts
I’ve always appreciated games that operate under a simple premise. Anything that involves solving a puzzle or accomplishing a simple task appeals to the part of my brain that was solidly addicted to playing Tetris on my Gameboy Pocket when I was ten, always striving to reach the next level, […]
The word phenomena is one I’ve been coming across a lot the past few weeks. In “Virtual Bodies in Virtual Worlds: A Phenomenology of Play in Video Games,” Benjamin Gattet, for one, applies Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of phenomena to “the experience of playing a video game” through the use of […]
I’ve written before about our household habits of creating multiplayer where there is none, specifically in State of Decay, but my husband and I often find ways to share single-player experiences. I was thinking about this earlier this week, as we were yelling Stardew Valley tips at each other across […]
Full disclosure, I have read Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens five times. Cover to freaking cover, I have read it five times. That’s about three full times more than I have ever read any book. I have read it so many times because it is like a really good board […]
It’s no secret that I have depression. I’ve been chronically depressed my entire life, and even though it’s impacted by external events and forces, for the most part it’s just a chemical imbalance in my brain that makes me wake up mid-afternoon instead of when my alarm goes off at […]
Episode 143: The F*ck You Line: Games and Emotion (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this week’s episode we talk about games and emotion using a chapter from Katherine Isbister’s book How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. We talk about the emotions that […]
I have been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XV over the course of the last month. It’s a game that I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to play (or like), but I rented it on a whim and I have to admit that I was pretty quickly […]
Late to the party, or valley, I plant crops months after everyone else. I water parsnips, consider sprinklers, plan optimal placement for trellises. I buy cows. I resisted Stardew Valley for so long, but now it’s the first place I go when I have a moment to myself. This game […]
Today marks the 6th anniversary of Not Your Mama’s Gamer. Six years ago today we launched the site and broadcast with just me and Alex Layne. Over the course of six years, over a thousand posts, and almost 150 podcast episodes we have grown a lot. We now have a full staff […]
I’ve written about coming out as trans before, and I suspect this won’t be the last time I write about it either. Not necessarily because I love talking about my own experiences, but because of the nature of coming out as a constant experience, something that never truly happens once. […]
This semester marks the beginning of what I can only call my homeschooling journey with my kidlet after the closing of her project based learning school at the end of last year. This move has required my pulling out my experience as an elementary school teacher and combining it with […]
I find myself lately (and almost always, really) continuing to think about the future of feminist game studies, continuing to consider its implications and situatedness in academia, continuing to interrogate its orientations, goals, uses, and perspectives. And one thing I have especially been thinking about—something I find myself consistently returning […]
Games have taught us to fight, to follow orders and get the job done, because if we do, we’ll be rewarded in some way. Fewer games have taught us to reflect on what we’re doing, and why. We can reflect on our own, of course — that’s a lot of […]
I spent a large portion of my winter break on the road. I went up to Minnesota to visit my parents for a week, and as soon as I touched down in Indianapolis I began my drive South to visit my partner in Kentucky and my friends in Alabama. Other […]
Episode 143: Best, Worst, and Everything In Between: GOTY 2016 (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). In this week’s episode we talk about our picks for GOTY as well as the games we wish we had never played (and everything in between). And […]