Playing at Leadership: Games, Gaming, & Leadership Studies
"Reality, unlike games, is broken." – Jane McGonigal
Sometimes, after a lot of yelling, typing, hand-waving, and crying, sometimes the powers-that-be actually listen. Even more rarely, they listen and then act. And when that happens, it becomes clear that speaking out and speaking up really do matter. That … Read More »
My TLF review of Anita Sarkeesian’s second video in the Positive Female Characters in Video Games series (on Jade from Beyond Good & Evil). A lot of my frustrations with this episode are less to do with the specifics about … Read More »
So a recent (completely civil, polite, and even productive) exchange got me thinking about one of the problems with videogame culture, and, indeed, fan culture more broadly. This is the problem of fan “ownership”–of a game, a franchise, an entire … Read More »
So today’s example of scare-mongering “science” comes to us from Canada (via the Telegraph in the UK), where someone has apparently “proven” that “Call of Duty increases risk of Alzheimer’s disease,” according to the headline. When added to a recent … Read More »
On my way to a conference the other day, I was sitting on the plane reading Estelle Freedman’s No Turning Back, a history of feminism. The young woman in the seat next to me interrupted: “Excuse me, is that a … Read More »
Today a friend asked a very good question, and one that I think is valuable to try to answer for cultural critics and academics the world over. What am I even gonna tell my students today. “Well I know everything … Read More »
Last night, Anita Sarkeesian celebrated being named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year. The piece in TIME was written by Wil Wheaton, an advocate of equality and diversity in geekdom in general, and gaming in … Read More »
Last week, Indiana passed a so-called Religious Freedom Bill that permits employers and business owners to discriminate against employees and customers on the basis of their religious beliefs. In essence, what this means is that a company can refuse to … Read More »
Today an article by Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw – “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59.1 (2015) – came … Read More »
So yesterday Stephen Totilo of Kotaku did a write-up of a talk given at NYU by Anita Sarkeesian. Twitter and the internet in general naturally have things to say about this, some good, some bad. But what drew my attention … Read More »
So today it was brought to my attention that there is a fan mod for Dragon Age Inquisition that allows players to modify the sexual preferences of the companion characters in the game. Some people are thrilled by this. Some … Read More »
There was enough anger left in me to have more to say about the most recent Law & Order SVU episode on GamerGate. Here it is. The TLF post contains a much more detailed breakdown of what went wrong in … Read More »
So this week one of the many things flying about on the feminist internet is the fact that Law and Order: Special Victims Unit has more or less decided to feature internet harassment against Anita Sarkeesian (with a little Zoe … Read More »
A recent conversation has reiterated one of the components of recent internet discussions of games – particularly those containing overt misogyny – that bothers me more than most of the others. It’s the conflation amongst many online of “criticism” with … Read More »
So yesterday my attention was drawn to this opinion piece on Polygon about whether or not we can rely on men to write good female characters. I assume, by extension, that women must therefore be unreliable as authors of male … Read More »