I spent my Christmas up in Minnesota visiting my parents. I didn’t grow up in the small town where they currently reside, as we moved around a lot thanks to my Dad being in the Navy, but their new house still has all of the pictures and knick-knacks I saw […]
identity
10 posts
I’ve mentioned before that my mother started gaming in her 70s (sorry mom) in order to play games with my daughter and I thought that this was the coolest thing ever. This Christmas I gifted her with some appropriate gaming accessories for her 3DS (because she’s not that much of […]
We’ve been writing a bit about Westworld from a games studies perspective because it’s fascinating, but also because it’s a big, beautiful, visual version of so much we discuss already, and for me, with my interests in how we continue to think about the magic circle, and about player experience […]
When it comes to performance, I’m something of a jack of all trades. I’ve studied music, theatre, and dance, and even though writing took the front seat on the bus of my vocational life, I can still shake off my mental cobwebs enough to play each of the four instruments […]
There’s an innate yearning within humanity to connect, share, and make sense of our experiences. It’s more natural than secret-keeping, which is dogmatically taught to us before we learn how to string concepts and words together. So when I was asked to talk about the fact that #yesIplay, it took […]
As we move into August and the anniversary of #GamerGate’s beginnings, I’ve been thinking through a lot of the discussions around gaming, and gaming identity, over the past year. It’s not a new topic for me; I’ve written about what it means to be a gamer often, both recently and […]
Since its release, I’ve spent a lot of time playing, and thinking about, Sam Barlow’s Her Story. I’ve played it on my own Steam account, and also on my husband’s — I didn’t want to interrupt my own game, which was then unfinished, but I did want to see if […]
A recent thread on GamerGate hub KotakuInAction outlines a plan to “game” Twitter to get viral traction for a tag about the ggautoblocker, the tool created by Randi Harper that allows for wholesale blocking of GG participants, and TheBlockBot, a similar, though more universal tool. The call asks supporters to […]
My post for today was going to be specifically about Evan Narcisse’s article that talked about video games’ blackness problem, but as I sit down to write I find that it is only going to be tangentially connected. Video games do have a blackness problem…and so do video game players. […]
What does it mean to be a gamer? This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. It’s one we’ve talked about here, since, as women, our “gamer cred” is often questioned, but when I ask what it means to be a gamer, I don’t mean hardcore gaming. […]