This spring, game designers of Rust courted controversy by assigning players unchangeable, racialized avatars. Adrienne Shaw unpacks how game design helped produce some of that player outrage.
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Games
Unpacking Rust, Race, and Player Reactions to Change
#gamergate
The rhetoric of #gamergate co-opts concerns that women and minorities in the industry have raised for years. It has struck a chord now because the industry is changing.
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Kollecting Kim K. Skills: Kardashianized Celebrity in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood
In the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the celebrity legitimizes her image while also propagating her brand by redefining fame as an accumulation of skills.
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Following the Instructions
Continuing to think about LEGO, the idea of “creativity,” and the unequal extension of that idea to different consumer groups.
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Fort McMoney: Media for the Age of Oil
Melissa Aronczyk discusses Fort McMoney, an interactive web documentary designed to raise awareness of the conflicts among industrial, political and environmental interests in the development of oil.
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What Are You Missing? Apr 28 – May 11
Ten (or more) media industry news items you might have missed recently.
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#1ReasonToBe and Many Reasons To Still Worry
One of this year's key stories is how the industry deals with difference and inclusivity, both for developers and for the industry as a whole.
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Changing the conversation, not just the games
Thoughts about the EA/HRC Full Spectrum mini-conference and LGBT representation in the gaming industry.
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More Lively Than Life is Our Motto: Better Living Through Gamification
As we reinvent our lives through gamification, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive.
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Booth Babe Backlash
A year of misogyny in geek culture resurrected the booth babe debate that has contributed to a backlash against female fandom.
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Episodic: What Games Learned From TV
While episodic gaming is a new frontier for how developers make games, it is perhaps an even larger divergence in terms of how we play games.
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The Internet, Baseball Analysis, and the Persistence of Dogma
A brief discussion and interview with Baseball Prospectus podcaster Kevin Goldstein on the current state of baseball analysis.
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M2AF: Message Received
What I find surprising about gaming M2AFs is how often they quickly turn intimate, even if the only connection between sender and receivers is an ad hoc one established to gain an achievement. It is not uncommon to get a highly personal message of one kind or another.
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Feminist Game Studies
It isn’t difficult to find feminist game studies, or feminist gamers. The reputation of misogyny in video game culture, lack of women and racial minorities in the industry, the perpetuation of player stereotypes in games marketing and the popular press, and the dearth of non-white, female, or queer characters in games has provided plenty...
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Circles, Charmed and Magic
Adrienne Shaw interrogates the stigma associated with the solitary gamer by applying queer theory to games studies, arguing in the process for a broader consideration of how these two scholarly approaches might work together.
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