Tag Archive for "video games"

Posts Tagged video games

By Isz Janeway • 8 years ago

Review: “We Know The Devil” is a horror game about community and survival

Ed. note: This post was originally published on the Community site.

We Know The Devil is a game, a visual novel, created by Aevee Bee with art direction by Mia Schwartz.

Ed. note: This post was originally published on the Community site.

We Know The Devil is a game, a visual novel, created by Aevee Bee with art direction by Mia Schwartz.

By Maya Dusenbery • 8 years ago

New study suggests that men who harass women online are losers. Literally.

A new study examining the behavior of Halo 3 gamers provides some insights into the dynamics driving online misogynistic harassment. The takeaway? As the headlines trumped with predictable satisfaction, “Men who harass women online are literally losers.”

By Katherine Cross • 9 years ago

Play it again, Max: A review of “Life is Strange”

If Fullbright Company’s award-winning 2013 video game Gone Home has inspired a trend, I certainly shan’t complain. With the release of the first chapter of Dontnod Entertainment’s Life is Strange this past week, all doubt about Gone Home’s cultural impact should be dispelled by this most sincere form of ludic flattery.

By Katherine Cross • 9 years ago

Fungal Pleasures: Captain Toad and self-care

Being a gaming critic (particularly one who often courts controversy by being a feminist critic) I always feel “switched on” when I play even particularly fun or long-awaited games. It’s increasingly difficult just to let go and lose myself in the flow of repetitive motion, say, or feel completely immersed in a story.

By Maya Dusenbery • 9 years ago

Watch: GamerGate gets The Colbert Report treatment

Last night Stephen Colbert sat down with Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian to discuss GamerGate and the fact that “feminazis in the gamer world are coming for our balls to snip them off, put them into a little felt purse and take them away, so we have to play your non-violent games.”

By Maya Dusenbery • 9 years ago

After terrorist threat, feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancels lecture at Utah university

*Trigger warning*

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency was scheduled to give a talk at Utah State University tonight. But she was forced to cancel after someone threatened to commit “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the event went forward and the state’s conceal-and-carry law prevented the police from taking adequate security measures to address the threat.

*Trigger warning*

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency was scheduled to give a talk at Utah State University tonight. But she was forced to cancel after ...

By Katherine Cross • 9 years ago

We must dissent: Intel bows to GamerGate campaign to silence feminist video game critics

The #GamerGate movement, which might be explained best to outsiders as the Tea Party of video gaming, was born in a fire of harassment against one woman in August. The crowdsourced terroristic harassment campaigns that have historically been directed at individuals—by now a dreary feature of everyday life online—have now, with the advent of GamerGate, collectivised. Instead of attacking one woman deemed to be too loud and too disagreeable, these characteristics have now been projected on any person in the orbit of games journalism who has had a positive word to say about equality. GamerGate called them all “social justice warriors” or SJWs, giving new life to the old pejorative, and set about attempting to purge them from ...

By Katherine Cross • 10 years ago

Not buying sexism: How inclusive games show hope for gaming culture

The tiresome canard about how “sex(ism) sells” has been dealt with in a number of ways. Empirical studies demonstrate no correlation between a film or video game’s sexist/sexual content and its marketplace success, and we have evidence that suggests that among game industry doyens, this notion may simply be a classic case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Industry analysis tells us that video games led by female characters receive a paltry 40% of the marketing budgets of male-led games; when such games fail to sell as well as their more lavishly supported competitors, the results are then used as empirical proof of the subjective view that saw them underfunded in the first place.

Circular reasoning par ...