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racism

December 13th

…and discourse, which have been pretty shitty for women, and especially women of colour!

  • Speaking From The Chest: Streamer Receives Death Threats After Holding Console Makers To Account | Kotaku Ash Parrish chats with ZombaeKillz about holding companies to account on their pledges of inclusivity, dealing with racism, gatekeeping, and harrassment, and what more equitable and inclusive games spaces should look like.
  • AND, PRESENTING, – DEEP HELL Skeleton takes one step back from Awards Discourse to scrutinize the rituals of awards shows themselves, asking what role they actually play in upholding and legitimizing a particular ideology of popular…

    • January 10th

    …monstrosity in games alternately along gender/misogyny and cosmic/racist axes.

    • Game Log: Tales of Berseria – Digital Ephemera Dan Cox weighs tropes and tensions of femininity and monstrosity in an uncommon feminine-led installment in the Tales series of JRPGs.
    • Zarf Updates: Four (or five) recent Lovecraftians Andrew Plotkin explores the mechanical and thematic diversities to be found among games associated with a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror influence, as well as the various ways in which these games address or don’t address the racism inexorably tied to the tradition.

    “A lot of Lovecraftian games start out with

    …

    January 17th

    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

    …

    January 24th

    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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    January 31st

    …NintendoLife Kate Gray muses on the value of an ending not yet written.

  • Playing Tabletop Games Alone Helped Me To Feel Less Lonely – New Rules Zainabb Hull recounts some of the theraputic, liberating potentialities of solo tabletop play–as well some of the challenges (content notification for discussion of ableism and racism).

    • “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…

    February 7th

    …to those basic tenets.

  • The World in Cyberpunk 2077 Is Hollow—the Posters Prove It | WIRED Stacey Henley finds that a broad study of 2077‘s posters reveals an overwhelming worldbuilding focus on sex, violence, and racism.
  • Spectacular | Bullet Points Monthly Autumn Wright struggles with 2077 as a work of hollow spectacle.

    • “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…

    August 8th

    …on the vine.

    • The Tricky Art of Preserving Canceled Games Like Star Fox 2 | Kotaku Leah Williams delves into the topic of preservation and the incomplete and unreleased games at stake.
    • My Story of Bullying, Harassment, and Racism at Blizzard Entertainment Brissia Jiménez details a firsthand account of Blizzard’s culture of workplace harrassment and abuse (content notification for those things).

    “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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    Queer Games Criticism in 2021 (so Far)

    …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.”

    Locating the Self

    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….

    Adrienne Shaw | Keywords in Play, Episode 14

    …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…

    December 5th

    …following authors unpack what they mean in different games narratively, structurally, politically.

    • Immune, Superior Protagonists in Zombie Videogames – Haywire Magazine B.G.M. Muggeridge peers into the ideology at play in the zombie/survivor dynamic in games along axes of individualistic superiority, hygeine, and finally colonialism and racism.
    • On the Death of Samus Aran | Unwinnable Julie Muncy unpacks Samus Aran’s identity as expressed through bodily transformation–cyborg modding, genetic hybridity, and finally non-canonical death.

    “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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