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gamer

April 26th

…move the goalpost, forced me to confront my daily anxieties, and gave me a safe space to create coping mechanisms that I can attempt to apply to areas of my life with stakes that remain incredibly high.

In a somewhat similar exploration of failure, back at Offworld, Gita Jackson writes movingly about games and failure, musing: “I wonder how seeing yourself die — because your avatar is you, in a sense — changes how we see our failures in our own life.”

This is Who I Am

On a different note, at Not Your Mama’s Gamer,…

May 24th

…One industry person calling the review “poisonous to the industry: to gamers, to game developers, to game journalists” all because it brings up ideas for consideration.

Meanwhile, Cara Ellison says goodbye to the “new wave” of games criticism, whatever that means. She doesn’t quite know, so she supposes a meaning and works from there. Goodbye, Cara, and good luck in your future endeavors.

The Culture

How gaming sees itself verses how it actually it.

Bob Mackey wrote “The People vs. ‘Nerd Culture’” for US Gamer. He uses Simon Pegg’s recent words about the co-opting of this…

July 19th

…news, but here are a few highlights you shouldn’t miss.

First, Gamasutra wisely took the opportunity to repost the video from Iwata’s frequently-quoted “Heart of a Gamer” speech, delivered as a keynote at the 2005 Game Developers Conference. Additionally, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt took an extended dive through past interviews and articles on the man, coming away with an enriched understanding of Iwata’s personal and professional philosophy.

Iwata’s long-time friend and Earthbound developer Shigesato Itoi also posted an emotional eulogy noting his passing, an unofficial translation of which you can find here provided by Yomuka’s Lindsay. And lastly (but…

September 13th

…of a rather disgusting video applies the same lens toward fat characters.

Quiet

(Content Warning: discussion of rape.)

Alisha Karabinus, at Not Your Mama’s Gamer, decides to take the psudo-science explanation of Quiet’s state of dress on its face and instead explore the poor execution of its presentation. She laments that there was potential even in the ludicrousness of it that gets lost in the shuffle of its more obvious detrimental aspects.

Emma Boyle was much less diplomatic in her piece on Gadgette, blasting the explanation as more of an excuse to do more of the…

October 25th

…elements; the word “overstuffed” comes to mind. (Not coincidentally, it’s a word that showed up repeatedly in reviews of [Franzen’s] Purity.)

Oh Girls Just Wanna Have [a greater presence in the fiction they engage with]

Fusion’s Latoya Peterson begins her series “Girl Gamers” by exploring the conditions a person has to meet to earn the label.

Teddie at the always-excellent Fem Hype expresses frustration with the limited gender options in most character creation systems. For Teddie, establishing their hero’s gender outside the constraints of a binary is necessary to feeling welcome in the experience:

…

November 1st

…1956 film, Carousel (Content Warning: domestic violence, alcoholism, incest):

It is a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a person in their own right.

Gadgette’s gamer-in-chief, Emma Boyle, asks why feminine clothing is so polarised in games, using Bioshock Infinite…

October Roundup: ‘Leadership’

…game-master or guild leader? Are there better modes of coordinating people than locating all decision-making in one person or is one expert mentoring a group the best model? Tell us how the idea of leadership influences the way you experiences games.

Gaines Hubbell of Higher Level Gamer starts us off with a piece about how games convey leadership through rhetoric. Hubbell argues that “We can learn leadership through games mimetically—by watching and imitating them—although I’m not sure we should.”

At Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alisha Karabinus returns to State of Decay, where she’s thrilled to have an…

November 15th

…at Unwinnable, James Murff finds Black Ops 3’s departure from binary plot constraints of old a welcome change:

This plot setup allows Call of Duty to explore themes of human augmentation, mental breakdown, the nature of sentience and even the afterlife. While it doesn’t approach them as intelligently as a cyberpunk novel such as Neuromancer or Snow Crash, it’s far smarter and more strange than a Call of Duty game has any right being.

Politics as Usual

Not Your Mama’s Gamer details an anonymous reader’s two-part account of sexism while working at a major…

December 6th

…Freeman’s Cibele and The Videogame Confessional, and Jorge Albor reflects on how games represent personal experiences.

At Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Bianca Patti looks at the use of trauma in women’s stories such as Tomb Raider and Jessica Jones.

Sandbox

Also at Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alisha Karabinus writes on Open World experiences and how they fit into a definition of play.

Stephen Beirne has a new Two Minute Crit up on his youtube, where he talks about the Crouch and Zoom mechanics of the Metal Gear Solid games. And consider picking up Unwinnable Weekly’s new…

December 20th

…how gender factors into it all.

Some people suggest that we need everyone who plays games to identify as a gamer. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I do think it is important that anyone who does feel an investment in that label to feel the right to adopt it […]. But I also think that it is just as important and politically necessary to suggest that you don’t have to be a gamer to care about games.

In other news, Twitter hired a “Director of Gaming Partnerships” this week. Nobody is quite sure what that…