In the 50th year of the journal of College Composition and Communication, in 1999, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams began their essay “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies” with a statement they call aphoristic, but that remains an important reminder we […]
embodiment
11 posts
The fifth and final season of Orphan Black began a couple weeks ago. It’s a show about human clones—about how being a clone might impact both one’s personal identity and one’s relationship to others (that is, one’s potential roles as sister, daughter, mother, partner). But more than that, the show […]
A few months ago, I wrote about A Normal Lost Phone and the layered experience of inhabiting another through the use of their phone as an empathy device, so when I stumbled upon another game that used a similar approach, I picked it up immediately. But while A Normal Lost […]
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
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 […]
In response to a 2014 essay in First Person Scholar by Miguel Penabella, Jim Gee said, “For me, what makes a video game good is a loving marriage between game mechanics and content,” a simple statement that feels like a summary of much of the ludic theory we work with […]
Because I obviously enjoy being sad, depressed, and/or miserable, I’m going to continue this conversation regarding feminism and war in light of 11 bit studio’s most recent game – This War of Mine: The Little Ones. To have a better grasp of what I’m processing through and digging deeper to understand, […]
Last week, around the same time that I started playing Anatomy, my sister turned me onto The Black Tapes Podcast, and, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about the game and the podcast concurrently. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw puts it, The Black Tapes Podcast is framed “as a Serial-esque series hosted by […]
My vision is pretty bad, and it’s been pretty bad since the fourth grade. My night vision is even worse. I have heard optometrists utter “whoa” during appointments (which, in my opinion, is never a great thing to hear a doctor say). That Twilight Zone episode in which the guy’s glasses […]
So, I have some things to say about “resting bitch face.” For those of you who may have been living under a rock up until reading this post, “resting bitch face,” as Jessica Bennett explains in a recent New York Times piece, “I’m Not Mad. That’s Just My RBF.,” is […]
After writing about Among the Sleep a few weeks ago, I have found myself continually thinking about the idea of children as protagonists. Indeed, I have been working to understand just what it is about the embodiment of childhood that is at work in such figures. In other words, what […]