Playing at Leadership: Games, Gaming, & Leadership Studies
"Reality, unlike games, is broken." – Jane McGonigal
So in the furor over Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Videogames, the content of what she’s producing has been largely overlooked. But The Mary Sue‘s Becky Chambers has a suggestion: I want a character who makes me feel emboldened … Read More »
Today, Kotaku linked to a New York Times article by one of its own, or, rather, a debate between Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo and Yahoo‘s Chris Suellentrop on the fiscal future of gaming. A part of this discussion was the assertion … Read More »
So IGN has been holding a presidential election with videogame characters as the candidates. Each candidate represents a platform – not a party platform, but a gaming platform. For Xbox 360, Commander Shepard (Mass Effect) has just narrowly edged out … Read More »
So an article that grabbed my attention yesterday is actually on how playing games can make us nicer – specifically, “Forget violence: Do co-op games make us less aggressive?” by Jamie Madigan on Gamasutra. I’ve mentioned co-op games on this … Read More »
I would like to start by acknowledging that I don’t play Guild Wars and have no intention of playing Guild Wars 2 – although not because of anything about to be included in this post. Today’s Border House blog makes … Read More »
Since at present I’m both replaying and revising a paper on Dragon Age II, when I saw Tom Biggs’s article on morality and gaming at IGN, I was intrigued, and then a bit annoyed. Biggs argues that “real-world morals” have … Read More »
So while browsing through my twitter feed yesterday, this article pops up from gameranx: “Dead or Alive Devs Went ‘Hands-On’ to Get the Breast Physics Right in Dead or Alive 5.” My first thought – “Is this really news-worthy?” – … Read More »
After having played (and re-played) both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, it occurs to me that a discussion of the portrayal of gender in the games themselves ought rightfully to include the gender of the player-character. Most of … Read More »
Yesterday a Border House article popped up on my twitter feed that sent me into fits. Gunthera1 from Border House reported on the new announcement that Borderlands 2 will have a casual mode for inexperienced players, followed up this morning … Read More »
So one of the major questions that’s behind a lot of what I’ve been talking about here is not why are women being harassed in online and gaming communities, but why are they a minority to begin with… After all, … Read More »
So in all the furor over horrible depictions of women in videogames, Assassin’s Creed: Liberation has quietly made a very important point, as Kotaku‘s Evan Narcisse notes in his article. That point is that the protagonist of the new AC … Read More »
I’m borrowing a phrase from Stanley Kubric’s Clockwork Orange and spinning off of yesterday’s post about ultraviolence in God of War, talking about the current trend and probable future of videogame violence. Interestingly, there’s a followup to the God of … Read More »
Gamasutra recently posted an article about how the next God of War game is going to curtail violence against women. As they point out, it is unclear precisely how that is going to manifest itself in the game. The quotation … Read More »
Rob Fahey’s article at gamesindustry international, “A Question of Maturity,” makes an argument that games are not yet capable of being “mature,” saying that “You can’t make someone experience love through a video game, or sorrow.” On the one hand, … Read More »
So recently there has been a lot of hype surfacing around the “culture of rape” that exists in games and on the internet. But it’s also surfaced in more “common” forums, such as when comedian Daniel Tosh made a “rape-joke” … Read More »