Masculinity and femininity are often associated with gender and physical sex (often confused with the concept of gender) but are more accurately considered the idealized traits of performing or embodying certain gender identities. This comes into focus when we see people playing with the ideas and expectations of gender performance and the clarity of seeing … Continue reading Feminine and Masculine Game Mechanics
Replayability is one concern for gamers, mainly because not many people like to shell out sixty dollars for the next triple-A title. Most people tend to like movies they can watch several times and still feel excited. This is what I was thinking about as I started replaying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild about … Continue reading Replayability in Games
On the app store for Android and iOS is a game simply tittled "Survive." I'm a fan of good game apps. 2048 was a fun one for me. When it was popular and new, I really liked Angry Birds. I wasn't a fan of Flappy Bird, but I know that others liked it. There's been … Continue reading Survive – A Survival Simulation Game
Unreliable narrators in books is a catch all term for characters that are unable to accurately look at and description their environments, situations, and the other characters they interact with. Most characters could be described as this as, unless the piece is written in a third person omnipresent point of voice, you can't get an … Continue reading Spec Ops: The Line, and Unreliable Narrators
In most games, but especially my latest obsession of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, I'm constantly at odds with the aesthetic of armor. But when a game gives me the option to play dress up with the main character, you best believe me when I say I'm not running around in ugly armor. I will play an objectively "harder" … Continue reading Armor: Practicality v. Aesthetic
The game, for the most part, gives you pieces of myth talked about as if they had happened recently or at least in the recent past. These feats of heroism, of divine intervention are talked about with a firm belief. Now, the Greek pantheon is largely considered myth and fun stories to retell rather than … Continue reading Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Making the Most of your World
In the ideal open sandbox RPG, you can do anything, go anywhere. Depending on the developers, the result of the game can favor lawfulness or chaos. For instance, in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you aren't given any missions that include stealing from others; you're not even given the option of killing NPCs. For … Continue reading Skyrim: Favoring Chaos
The introduction of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim put "open world" on everyone's tongues. Suddenly, it became the next big thing to emulate in order to be successful. The Dragon Age series moved from semi-open mapped to their version of an open world in Dragon Age: Inquisition with very large maps that could be accessed via fast travel. But … Continue reading The Evolution of Open World Games
If you haven't played Dungeons and Dragons before, I highly recommend it, especially if you're a fan of games like Divinity: Original Sin, Dragon Age, or A Bard's Tale. These games are almost digital recreations of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast, with some clear deviations due to the format in which you're playing. These … Continue reading Emulating Dungeons and Dragons
I've only recently started to think on this in a way that's more than a passing thought, like it's something that's existed but that it was so common I never really stopped to think about it: why is there a lack of women as the central roles in story based games? The only ones that … Continue reading The Lack of Female Protagonists in Games
Video Games Deconstructed 