I ended my blog post last week with some lingering questions I still have about the representation of single motherhood as a destructive and dysfunctional force in The Park, which doesn’t feel like a particularly satisfying way to wrap up my examination of the game. So I want to spend […]
gender roles
8 posts
A couple of weeks ago, I was both surprised and not surprised when the story about Target and the gendered toy signs blew up. I was not surprised because I know many people still cling to traditional view of gender and toys, but I was surprised by the level of […]
Moms have it rough, man. I’m talking socially, of course, considering the fact that the United States is only one of two countries in the world that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers. (Get it together, United States.) But I’m also talking representationally, and it is this particular […]
I recently read an essay by Ann Friedman entitled “On Being a Badass,” in which Friedman explores what it means for women to be considered badasses in today’s corporate landscape. As Friedman explains, the term badass generally seems to imply “both toughness and disaffectedness. It’s rare to look at someone […]
Last October, Sega released Alien: Isolation, and much of the discussion around the game has dealt with its pacing, its level of difficulty, its relationship and faithfulness to the film franchise, and whether or not the game is successfully scary. Relatively little discussion has occurred, however, regarding the manner in […]
I recently finished playing through Killbrite Studio’s Among the Sleep (2014), and after falling through a wormhole of online reviews, blog posts, and comment sections regarding people’s reviews and interpretations of the game, I have been thinking quite a lot about the representation of children, children-heroes, and children-victims in video games. […]
Romance can sometimes be a tricky and troubling thing, and it appears that this is no different in the the virtual world. In my review of Story of Seasons, a new addition to the Harvest Moon franchise that had to undergo a name change due to licensing issues, I described […]
I admit it, sometimes I feel like I’m being a little bit hard on Nintendo and of the various studios they direct and/or publish for when I critique the way they present gender in their games. After all, in comparison to some of the other big name game studios, they […]