The voice actors strike brings to light questions about the boundaries between work and play
Category Archives: video games
Is Anyone Out There?: Alienation in No Man’s Sky
No Man’s Sky explores the loneliness of the networked life
Digital Doldrums: A Review of Ready Player One
Would you like to save your game?
The Hunt for the Familiar: The Nostalgia of Pokémon GO
Pokémon GO brings players familiarity in an increasingly uncertain world
No Solace in Shadows – A Review of Liyla and the Shadows of War
Much of the current debate around video games revolves around whether or not games should be viewed through a political lens. There are many gamers who advocate for better representation of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in games, and there are others who reject these demands as “politicizing” the ostensibly non-political. For those […]
War Games – Gender and Violence After Gamergate
Why are political criticisms of video games so often treated as declarations of war? Gamers may understandably find the question of politics to be rather tiring. To debate whether or not video games are political is, in itself, an exercise in politics, insofar as debate is the process by which the limits of acceptable speech […]
Do You Think This Is A Game?
How does “life” attempt to imitate video games? Or, how do other media forms and corporations turn to video games for inspiration? In some video games, character statistics are measured in numbers or grades and improvements in abilities are correlated to increased stats. In some video games, players even allocate points to different skill metrics […]
Where Do You Go When You Go Online?
Was there ever a sweeter serenade than the song of dial-up internet? After hearing the ghostly sound of modems past floating around my office today, I thought about how that sound has disappeared into the technological past. In a country where only 3% of Americans still use dial-up, the song is almost a dead language, one that used […]
