"Reality, unlike games, is broken." – Jane McGonigal
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 »
Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives examines a variety of games and game types, but something he said while explaining open-world games (games which do not have restrictive paths for the player to follow, but instead allow the player to plot his … Read More »
So a couple of things have come together to form today’s topic/question: When is something “mean,” when is it “bullying,” and when is it “hate speech”? One of those things was a recent tweet by a friend who argued that … Read More »
This post was inspired by several different things, including a couple of recent articles sent to me by a colleague and a post made on Google+ by a friend. The question at hand is one of authenticity – specifically, geek … Read More »
So here’s an interesting article about a photo project concerning real people and their online avatars by Maria Popova on Brain Pickings. I think I mentioned at one point that most of the time, if given a choice, I will … 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 »
Last year at the Ethical Inquiry through Video Game Play and Design conference at the Prindle Institute for Ethics at Depaw University, I had the great pleasure of discovering (and playing) cooperative boardgames, specifically, Yggdrasil. Since, I’ve also been able … Read More »
So this week’s Gamasutra “This Week in Video Game Criticism” did a write-up of some of the more recent incidents in misogyny and bigotry in the gaming world, which I’m going to reproduce here at length: I would be remiss … 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 »
Feminist Frequency just posted a tweet about how an organization called Gamers Against Bigotry was hacked and shut down for putting together a database of people who are willing to pledge that they will not engage in bigoted behavior online … 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 »