Women as reward. It’s an unfortunately common sexist practice I see in many of the video games I have played and the video games I have seen marketed. Rewarding players with women, all women – not just those that are cisgendered, is equally problematic. While games use women and women’s […]
women in games
27 posts
I’ve been catching up on a lot of reading this summer, and much of what I’ve been reading engages with the complexities of family structures and kinship ties. From Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina to Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, from Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats to Toni Morrison’s […]
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 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, […]
Update: Several of our readers have reached out to us about the title of this post, and I wanted to make sure that their voices are heard and that we take the opportunity to begin a conversation about it by addressing their concerns. Here is one such email we received, […]
This post is a write-up of a talk I gave recently at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, WI. Enjoy! The GamerGate explosion in 2014 had far reaching implications that spidered across many areas: industry workplace practices, how gaming communities function, and how people view video games and gamers. Scholars have […]
Another E3 has quickly come and gone, and as I reflect back on the hours I spent watching conferences and live streams from the show floor, hunting down gameplay video, and reading the latest gaming news and updates, I can’t help but think that this year was notably different from […]
Last week saw the disbanding of the Frag Dolls, a group of female professional gamers that was formed in 2004 to demo and promote Ubisoft games as well as to participate in professional competitions (they became the first all-female clan to win a pro circuit tournament–CPL–in 2006). The first team […]
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 […]
So this has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks now, but I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and write about it. When the thought first came to me I wanted to write about Aisha Tyler’s comments about the increased numbers of female […]
As we discussed in our podcast last week, one of the community-selected sales in Steam’s Summer Sale was “Story-Rich Female Protagonist” games. Dr. B and I were decidedly unsure what to think of this category. Of course, one of the first questions she had is whether the creation of this […]
E3 is undoubtedly one of the most exciting times to be a gamer. It’s a week of thrilling announcements, new games, and industry advancements. I know that I for one spent practically my whole day on Monday watching the press conferences and gaming chatter. The discussions and “meeting of the […]
Let me start by saying the it has long been my secret shame that I have never finished a Legend of Zelda game. There, I said it, I feel better now. It’s out in the open. I feel that I can now move on with my recovery. It’s not that […]
Episode 64: Quiet, Woman!: On Silent Women in Video Games and On Underpants (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) Alex, Sam, and Sarah come together to consider Metal Gear Solid’s mute sniper, agency, and silent women in video games and on underpants. We had a few technical […]
Episode 59: “Vag Up”: On the Strength of Women in Game(s) (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) In this episode we talk about our favorite female protagonists and what the difficulty of these choices means for the games industry. This episode was recorded (mostly) in person […]