This past week, I’ve been catching up on reading Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, and a series of questions that Shaw asks in the second chapter (entitled “Does Anyone Really Identify with Lara Croft?: Unpacking Identification in Video Games”) […]
diversity
40 posts
When I look at the list of games introduced at this year’s E3, my eyes just sort of glaze over. I don’t care for a lot of the popular AAA games. When I do find a game I love, I often become obsessed with it and play it for hours […]
On Wednesday, DC Comics unleashed a brand new advertising and social media movement called “DC You.” With it, DC Universe will introduce 24 all-new series on top of 25 ongoing comics, and will feature characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. DC You promises to bring diversity to the comics […]
Last week I wrote about diversity in State of Decay, but I focused on only a very concrete, measurable aspect of diversity, raw numbers, when I broke down the ratios of white characters versus PoC in Undead Labs’ game. As I said in that piece, though, the numbers don’t tell the […]
This is the first in a series of Critical Let’s Plays on State of Decay Year One Survival Edition we’ll be featuring here at NYMG, exploring Lifeline, the main story mode, and Breakdown (though we may not do the full stories for all modes). There’s a lot to unpack in […]
State of Decay feels very diverse; you begin story mode as a black man and the first person who joins you and your friend is a Latina. In Lifeline, you begin as a female soldier fighting alongside a Hawaiian man and a black man. Often, in Breakdown, it’s easy to play […]
The minute I saw that Vice branched out to Vice Gaming, I was thrilled. Vice is a lot of things: Vice Magazine started in Canada in 1994 and quickly gained a reputation for having politically incorrect, provocative content. In 2002, the British edition of Vice was started, and by 2007 […]
Episode 97: Let’s Talk About Let’s Plays (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about Let’s Plays and their potential as critical media.
Last week, as Offworld was launching, we created a partial list of sites, podcasts, and resources that feature women and/or gamers of color, or that explore cultural issues of interest to those groups. We’ve since updated the list, through our own efforts and some help from friends and fans, and have […]
Yesterday, we talked about today’s relaunch of Offworld as a site dedicated to women and minorities in gaming, but we didn’t talk much about why that’s a good thing, or rather, a necessary thing. Since the announcement of the new site, I’ve been watching social media discussions around the move, […]
Late last week, Jonathan Cooper revealed on Twitter that, in the earliest animation tests for Mass Effect, the character of Commander Shepard was a woman, and the online equivalent of confetti was thrown by fans who played, and loved, Mass Effect through a female-centric lens. FemShep, after all, is the […]
Yesterday I was sitting in the coffee shop reading Miguel Sicart’s latest book, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay and giggling at the passage that read Cocktail parties are terrible places for doing philosophy. Yet when a polite stranger asks me what I do, I end up awkwardly explaining […]
I want to start this post by paying respect and thanks to all of the soldiers, volunteers, and contracted folks who have served to protect our country and made the ultimate sacrifice. I would also like to take the time to give thanks for the friends and family that supported […]
So Papo & Yo (Minority Media, 2012) is a game that I have been interested in playing for a while. When the indie title appeared on PS3 about a year ago I did a bit of research to see what other folks were saying about the title. I was simultaneously […]
So yeah, this post is going to be about voice. Voice has always been a huge issue with me. Not necessarily with how a voice sounds, but with the absence of voice and what that absence of voice actually means. It’s because of this that The Little Mermaid is one […]
I have been waiting a long time for Assassin’s Creed III (and ACIII:Liberation, but I’ll save that for another post). I pre-ordered my copy, mapped out my gameplay time, and did the happy dance when I learned that my mother would be visiting during the release window so that Pea […]