December 13th
…and discourse, which have been pretty shitty for women, and especially women of colour!
…and discourse, which have been pretty shitty for women, and especially women of colour!
…monstrosity in games alternately along gender/misogyny and cosmic/racist axes.
“A lot of Lovecraftian games start out with
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Welcome back, readers.
You know how these intros go at this point. Please continue to seek out ways to support Black causes. Everyone benefits from the dismantling of systemic racism. Well, almost everyone. Perhaps not Jeff Bezos. But fuck him anyway.
As for me, I apologize if this post ends up coming out a little late. You see, I’ve been playing a lot of videogames. Perhaps too many. Shouldn’t I be playing outside or something? What must my parents think? It’s not like my home province of Ontario just issued a too-little-too-late stay-at-home order with no clear
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Welcome back, readers.
A new American administration takes charge, but the offices and infrastructures that facilitate systemic racism remain unchanged or even strengthened. The immediate threat of a fascist insurrection seems to have diminished but there’s little else to celebrate when Black creators continue to experience harrassment and vitrol for speaking truth. So, as always, continue to seek out ways to support Black causes.
Around the site, we’ve got a new video roundup, courtesy of Connor! Please check it out.
This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games
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…NintendoLife Kate Gray muses on the value of an ending not yet written.
“For a short time, I’m no longer in a capitalist, racist, ableist society that demands me to perform to impossible standards for the sake of other people’s wealth. For a short time, I am in a utopia of my own construction, where my needs…
…to those basic tenets.
“Perhaps the most damning thing about Cyberpunk 2077, a game that wants so desperately to be bright and loud and cool, is that it is uninspiring. Whereas other games might use their systems to posit new ideas about history, gender, or humanism, ideas…
…on the vine.
“I have found that predators were enabled in all departments across Blizzard regardless of level, gender, age or race. It would appear that Blizzard was and is a place where bullying and harassment
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…and how they disappear. We don’t exist when there is no AAA discourse for clicks, we are put back into a utility closet for the next big release that raises concerns.”
Videogames have pretty much always served as important sites of identity formation and exploration, especially when this work of self-discovery is met with barriers and threats to safety in the material world. We see this research formalized with early work from Sherry Turkle, and further challenged and complicated with discussions of racism and sexism by authors like Lisa Nakamura and Kishonna L. Gray….
…of work that critiques algorithms, for example, right, and the underlying racism of those algorithms. And a lot of, especially popular discourse around that thinks about the encoded bias of those algorithms as something that was not necessarily intentional but is built into the systems that sort of produce those structures in the first place. And I think that people’s understanding of their position within algorithms, and how they think those algorithms function is actually just as important as unpacking the sort of underlying computer science of how they worked in the first place. And I think that’s something that…
…following authors unpack what they mean in different games narratively, structurally, politically.
“Everyone identifies with their body, in one way or another. It’s a part of who we are. But for Samus, her body
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