"Reality, unlike games, is broken." – Jane McGonigal
There have been a lot of discussions lately – in interviews with developers, online, and in my classroom – about the notion of “historical accuracy” or “believability” and issues of diversity and representation. Among them are Golden Glitch’s in-progress game … Read More »
So yesterday, Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency released a new video in a new series on videogames focused on positive depictions of women in games. It seems that these will be much shorter than those found in Tropes vs. Women … 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 »
At the moment, I’m replaying BioShock Infinite in order to teach it to my class (Games, Game Theory, and Leadership Studies). The first time I played through it, I had a lot of reactions, some of them positive, some negative. … Read More »
Today is International Women’s Day, GDC (Game Developers’ Conference) and PAX (Penny Arcade eXpo) East are wrapping up, and GamerGate is still hanging on to its undead, stinky existence. In honor of all the women – of all stripes, shapes, … Read More »
So I finally got around to playing Gone Home, mostly because I put it on my syllabus to force myself to play it (in that “I keep meaning to but just don’t” kind of way – not the “oh god … 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 »
Another Inquisition As-I-Play is up over on TLF, this one talking (appropriately, given my last post) about sexuality in BioWare games and why it – and the NPCCs in BioWare games – are so important to players.
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 »
So one of the games I did manage to play over the holidays was Peter Molyneaux’s Godus – my review is now up over on TLF, just in time for the east coast to find something to download and play … 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 »
And Part Five of my As-I-Play Inquisition… including MAJOR plot spoilers. Seriously.