Category: Read
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Peacecraft Brought Kindness to YouTube When It Needed It Most
Griffin McElroy’s Peacecraft series saw our sweet gnome friend Raandyy set out on a quest to end the fighting in World of Warcraft. In the process, it reminded us what YouTube’s gaming segment – and games culture as a whole – ought to be. Here is a secret: the part of my bio at the…
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How Can Overwatch Deal With its Toxic Players?
If you’re playing any online game, you’ll run into toxic players. This is an accepted inevitability. But it shouldn’t be. Overwatch in particular is intentionally welcoming and joyful. It’s about hope and heroes in a colourful world that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Plus, Blizzard has intentionally focused on inclusivity through its characters. And so it…
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How Gaming and VR Can Revolutionise Education
Teaching and learning have been going on since time began, however, the archaic systems of education in the world need to be brought into the modern age. Essentially, #EducationMustFall, and needs to be reformulated to fit into the 21st century. What the hell does this have to do with gaming, you ask? Well, in my…
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Grieving as a Gamer
Grieving and death are infinitely uneasy for me to write about. However, words aren’t coherently forming to write about anything else. Since the passing of my grandmother, I’ve struggled writing articles (this one has actually taken a good week), but it’s not for lack of trying or lack of video games. Rather, I’ve been so…
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Regarding GamerGate Victim Brianna Wu’s Congressional Campaign
After seeing the results of the 2016 presidential election, Brianna Wu had a decision to make: how was she going to make sure the culture of misogyny and online bullying saw a societal, cultural, and political defeat? Her answer: run for congress. Brianna Wu is no stranger to a good fight, whether that be a…
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Resist Jam: Games about Non-Violent Resistance
Resist Jam took place recently; dedicated to “creating games that resist oppressive authoritarianism in all its forms.” With over 200 games submitted, it’s impossible to get a handle on just how creative and diverse the projects were, so we’ve taken a look at just a few. Firstly we talked about public protest; and now we’ll…
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Sheri Graner Ray: 25 Years of Improving the Industry
The conversation about encouraging, supporting, and catering to women who play and make games is old. Really, it’s as old as games themselves. And women like Sheri Graner Ray have been working towards making the industry fairer for over 25 years. Graner Ray joined the industry as a writer in 1989 and has gone on…
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Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a Jingoist Nightmare
Earlier this month, when the Bolivian government demanded that the French government take action against Ubisoft over Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a good many people laughed. The South American country was disgusted at its portrayal as a territory solely comprised of cartels and cocaine empires and considered legal action. Ubisoft, for its part, admitted that it…
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Games Need To Provide Escapism for Women, Too
Horizon Zero Dawn starts with such promise. It seems to give a breath of fresh air for those of us dealing with sexism every day. In the starting area, women and men are considered equally able to fight or sew. They wear similar clothing. There are female military leaders, traders, and explorers. Ladies are allowed…
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Resist Jam: Games about Protest
Resist Jam took place recently; dedicated to “creating games that resist oppressive authoritarianism in all its forms.” With over 200 games submitted, it’s impossible to get a handle on just how creative and diverse the projects were in one article, so instead, here’s a series! Each will examine the cultural context of one theme found…
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Shovel Knight Body Swap : A Bold Step Forward for Gender in Games
A commonly heard excuse when explaining why a game couldn’t feature playable female characters is that it’s ‘too much work.’ It’s why Ubisoft found itself in hot water in 2014 when it trotted out the line to explain why Assassin’s Creed Unity only lets you play as men. But flipping that narrative right on its head,…
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Maternity Leave and Democracy 3
I purchased Democracy 3 on Steam in June 2014 after watching Sips play the game on YouTube and feeling incredibly frustrated with how he played the game. Everything was dandy. My first seven hours into the game were fantastic. During hour eight, however, I noticed the connections below when hovering over the “Maternity Leave” bubble in…
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Inclusivity in Overwatch Continues to Improve
At his recent DICE Summit talk, director Jeff Kaplan mentioned again the importance of inclusivity in Overwatch. This has been a continued rhetoric of the Blizzard team, and, most importantly, one that has been built upon significantly in the game’s post-release lifetime. That lifetime has been a rollercoaster. Overwatch has not only been one of…
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Diversity in Virtual Reality: The Next Step?
I love VR. I’ve loved being a bird soaring over post-apocalyptic Paris in Eagle Flight, getting up close and personal with a shark in Ocean Descent, and scoring very much over par as a massive robot in 100 Foot Robot Golf. But I also love exploring crafted stories about a wide range of characters. So…
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Safe Spaces For Dark Tasks
Videogames let us do some pretty fucked up things. Sometimes that’s part of their appeal, after all nobody played Postal for its gripping narrative. It was a rampage murder sim that garnered enough of an audience that it was far from the first or last of its kind. Videogames never made us subversive and terrible,…
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Gender Representation at the Game Developers Choice & IGF Awards
Diversity can’t just be a numbers game, and certainly isn’t limited to gender, but having facts and figures can be crucial to addressing further examinations. How, then, has gender representation in the games nominated for the Game Developers Choice Awards and the Independent Games Festival awards changed numerically since their inception – and how do they…