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January 20th

…every single level of participation, women are feeling the effects of sexism. Female gamers are sexualised, demeaned and assumed to be fakes by their male counterparts; those who go into STEM fields despite this abuse frequently find themselves stifled by the sexist assumptions of professors and fellow students alike; they must then enter an industry whose creative output is overwhelmingly populated with hypersexualised depictions of women and male-dominant narratives, and where the entrenched popularity of these tropes means their own efforts to counteract the prevailing culture will likely put them at odds with not only their colleagues, but also the…

March 10th

…trope, but still important; as I said on Twitter, I’m hoping this really makes its way into games studies classrooms. Check out the accompanying Tumblr, too, for further examples of the trope.

If you needed an example of why Sarkeesian chose to disable YouTube comments – and of why we so badly need a series like this in the world – see Mathew Jones’ round-up of what people are saying about Tropes vs. Women.

And for those who might ask “whers my tropes vs men vdieo???”… check out Stephen Beirne’s investigative piece on just what happened to that…

August 4

…a fashion that is equally critical of both the original interview and Kohler’s article in “You Knew This Was Coming If You Were Paying Any Attention.”

Ethan Gach writes that “It’s the Nostalgia that’s Dying, not Final Fantasy” and argues that this event is yet another in a long string of strange and often sexualized choices in the Final Fantasy franchise that we should have been, and should currently be, aware and critical of.

Absolutely unrelated to any of these previous articles, Dan Crabtree wrote about Hironobu Sakaguchi’s mark on the Final Fantasy franchise the culminated in Final…

November 3rd

…in-game avatars are both sexualized and made to resemble them.

Sobering on a whole different level is Robert Rath’s piece on The Escapist, “Why We Need Soldiers to Write about Games,” in which he discusses his father, a Vietnam veteran, the value that film had in both their lives, and being able to tell difficult stories using intermediary media.

And for our German-language readers, check out a fine selection of pieces below hand-selected by our foreign correspondent, Joe Koeller:

On Zeit Online, Marin Majica interviewed Rina Onur, founder of Peak Games, one of the biggest mobile and…

January 26th

…phenomenological writing that account for the messy, experiential, embodied parts of playing and parsing a videogame.

In response, Dan Joseph asks just what game studies even is, anyway. He meditates on the lack of cultural studies’ discourse within games studies, and the need for an understanding of the relationship between political economy and academia (and games studies in particular). He expands a little bit on Keogh’s call for close readings by adding that it isn’t just a phenomenological approach that’s required, but a materialist one too.

On his blog, Felan Parker provides a few “reading” strategies to help…

March 9th

…

Go Make Me a Sandwich’s wundergeek observes the challenges of, and proposes a possible solution for, satirizing the straight male gaze in videogame art when game art is already frequently ridiculous.

Finally, Desktop Dungeons developer Rodain Joubert shares how his team chose to approach non-sexualized women avatars and rectify gender disparities for their game.

Within Four Walls

Even if we happen to be the most radical of indies, consumerism and corporate culture remains a fact of life for many in games. These pieces take a peek inside studio culture — or muse about PR from afar.

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April 20th

…in games, not just for art, but also for mechanics. And on the subject of interesting geometries, Jamie Madigan has a piece up on Psychology of Games on the particular psychological process that leads us to anthropomorphize the rectangular characters of Thomas Was Alone.

At Mammon Machine, Aevee Bee observes that Fire Emblem: Awakening has so deemphasized the franchise’s trademark permadeath mechanic as to make it nonfunctional. Meanwhile, over at Normally Rascal, Stephen Beirne criticizes the recent mainstream depictions of parenthood in games as essentially power fantasies, and wonders if instead there are other mechanics which can model the…

July 6th

…game is tonally inconsistent is an understatement. It’s full-out atonal, right from the main menu screen: a morose soldier and his dog standing in mud and ruins while the sad theme music plays, juxtaposed with a jaunty text strapline about how many collectibles the game has.

Binders Full of Women

Exhausted with recent arguments breaking out within and adjacent to game communities online, Leigh Alexander has some simple Dos and Don’ts for combating sexism in online spaces.

Speaking of not helping, Sara Clemens places her tongue firmly in cheek this week to praise all the men…

01: Subjectivity

Every so often, a topic comes along which invites a higher level of discussion from the many bloggers, vloggers, critics, scholars and thinkers surrounding games. In our newest feature, Critical Discourse, we tackle one of these enduring topics and invite several writers into direct conversation with each other, to tease out even further insights and perspectives.

With that in mind, our inaugural topic for Critical Discourse is subjectivity. Stephanie Jennings starts the conversation with her essay, “Why We Need More Subjective Games Criticism,” Iris Bull chimes in with a short poem about games and subjectivity called “you” and

…

May 17th

…a culture of digital conservation:

There’s a cultural numbness here that dictates that if a product is not actively generating capital then it is rendered worthless. To compound the issue, while publishers actively seek to dismantle the past, they try to sell us on the lie that our digital-only future, as inevitable as it is, will mean that our games will live forever. At least until they unplug the servers.

Elsewhere, Simon Parkin deftly navigates the intersection of the real and virtual in Eve Online.

In keeping in the spirit of immeasurably vast expanses of…