by Emma Kostopolus | Jan 18, 2021 | Features, Interviews, Video Games
In the beginnings of Blaseball, the community was fragmented. Bits of lore, worldbuilding, and statistical analysis popped up all over the internet, and while there was a small amount of reporting being done, the vast majority of people being brought into the fold came from word-of-mouth through outlets like Discord and Twitter. And as each week passed and new fans were being introduced, the game itself moved at lightning speed, with canon characters and events being lost to the sands of time. There needed to be a place where people could gather, new fans could get information, and content creators could place their art for public consumption. And thus, the Blaseball wiki was born. I sat down with Steven Carver and Kyle Shockey, two of the current wiki admins, to discuss the site and the undertaking of running a community hub. (more…)
Emma is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition who studies how play impacts learning. Her words have also appeared in Critical Distance and Unwinnable. When not writing, she enjoys passing the controller between friends for runs of Silent Hill. She can be found @kostopolus on Twitter.
by Madison Butler | Dec 21, 2020 | Features, Recipes, Video Games
As someone who has been working in some capacity for well over a decade, there’s little to unite the various jobs—food service, floral design, administrative—I’ve held over the years.
Except one thing: The Sandwich of Desperation. (more…)
Madison Butler writes about advertising by day and about video games the rest of the time. She can usually be found crying about Final Fantasy and Nier: Automata on Twitter @madisonrbutler.
by Elvie Mae Parian | Oct 12, 2020 | Features, Tabletop Games, Video Games
Like many shows this past year, the Game Devs of Color Expo took things entirely online.
GDoCExpo was originally founded to create a much more inclusive space for marginalized creators in the games industry. GDoCExpo’s fifth year was hosted on Swapcard, a platform used to host online conferences and meetups. The convention had the format of a typical convention guidebook with information tabs on the guests, games, and their developers. (more…)
Elvie is an animator by day and tries too hard to be everything else by nightfall. Feel free to join her in screaming about anime and animals as she puts off what she should be really doing at @lvmaeparian.
by Jameson Hampton | Sep 28, 2020 | Features, Interviews, Video Games
If you’re not aware of Wholesome Games, do yourself a favor and take a browse through what must truly be the most wholesome Twitter feed in the whole gaming industry. They did their most recent indie game showcase near the end of August, which saw the announcement of a couple new games from various studios and developers. Among them was Pupperazzi, an upcoming title from developer Sundae Month and publisher Kitfox Games, which puts you behind the camera—and adorable dogs in front of it! With the showcase over and the new Pupperazzi trailer released, we had a chat with game director Isobel Shasha of Sundae Month.
(more…)
by Zora Gilbert | Aug 25, 2020 | Features, Video Games
The lights go up: bedroom, hallway, stove, monitor, flood. The home team faces their rivals, glowering and grinning in equal turn. The sun is nowhere to be found. This is the seventh solar eclipse this week. (more…)
Zora Gilbert cares a whole lot about words, kids, and comics. Find them at @zhgilbert on twitter, and find the comics they edit at datesanthology.com.
by Naseem Jamnia | Aug 13, 2020 | Features, Interviews, Video Games
When I started my MFA program in the fall of 2018, my Introduction to Graduate Studies course assigned a conference paper on a topic of our choice. I used this opportunity to dive into my latest video game obsession at the time, Undertale, and the way it portrays gender roles and nonbinary identities. Despite the dearth of peer-reviewed papers, I managed to find an article at the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures (the people who run Archive of Our Own) that floored me, a piece by a Professor Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg examining how Undertale fans have “straight-washed” the game rather than confront its overtly queer themes. That paper was everything I needed it to be and more, opening up the field of queer games study to me.
Imagine my glee when I was asked to actually talk to the person who wrote that paper. (more…)
By day, Sidequest’s Managing Editor Naseem Jamnia used to do sciencey things, but they now slam their keyboard and call it art. By night, they play a lot of video games. And regardless of the time, they spend way too much of it on Twitter, @jamsternazzy.
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