I spend a lot of time, much more time than I should, thinking about just what games are. Not what they mean to us, though also that, but what they are, where they begin and end, and what place we the players have in considerations of games. This is a […]
lara croft
10 posts
This summer, I’m in a class focused on women in games, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: one step forward, 97,000 steps back at every turn. The success stories—of games, characters, girl gaming clubs, industry professionals, more—are both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because we’re starved for them; terrible because those […]
Last week, I wrote about patriarchal constructions of fatherhood and daughterhood in The Last of Us, and I want to continue in that vein this week as well. To extend this line of thinking, I want to examine how it is such constructions come to be repeated across gaming narratives. […]
I finished playing Rise of the Tomb Raider this past week, and while I’ve written about the game a lot this month, I wanted to devote at least one more (but, most likely, not the last) post to exploring my thoughts upon completing the game–a review, of sorts. I’ve written […]
I’ve written a couple posts on Rise of the Tomb Raider already because I’ve been playing the game a lot lately, and while I’ve been playing, I’ve also been watching Jessica Jones on Netflix. As a result of my concurrent engagement with both, I’ve been thinking that the two seem to […]
I’ve been playing more Rise of the Tomb Raider this week, and in the course of my doing so, I’ve been thinking more about the manner in which parenthood is represented in the game. And there are two characters, specifically, whose roles in the game, whose relationships and interactions with […]
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the construction of motherhood in Alien: Isolation and Among the Sleep, and since then, I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and thinking a lot about how parenthood is constructed in this game as well. Indeed, it would seem that, […]
Since we’ve been discussing Her Story again lately, I went back and replayed the beginning. The game initially seeds the player with four videos tagged with the keyword “murder,” and since the gameplay is built solely from searching keywords, I catalogued all the major options in these early videos, omitting articles and […]
If I hadn’t discovered roleplaying, I wouldn’t have known what it was that set my ever-restless soul afire. I considered myself a serious writer at the delicate age of seven and, having come to this realization at such an early age, I carefully consumed and documented the world much like […]
***super super duper trigger warning: rape, victim shaming, assholes*** Recently there has been a big debate about the depiction of rape in video games. I’ll recap quickly for those who haven’t heard. In the upcoming Tomb Raider game, there is a scene in which Lara Croft has to defend […]