“Although countless studies have researched violence in video games and the sexualization of women in video games, there has yet to be academic research on sex workers and video games – a topic that sits at a unique intersection of those two prevalent themes.” – Kaeleigh Evans and Emma Traver, First Person Scholar
“Two mall shop-girls find out they’ve been stiffed wages that the men in their department haven’t. Can you help them make up the difference?” – About, Lost Wage Rampage
“With very few exceptions, a film director or a game designer doesn’t set out actively thinking, “I am going to make this to appeal directly to straight white men and everyone else can get bent.” Rather, the likelihood is high that the creator himself is a straight white male, and so comes to production with unconscious biases in place…And even if the creator in question is not all three (straight, white, male), the media landscape has been dominated by those elements for such a long time that this perspective is the default, and its point of view may not be challenged. Thus: the male gaze.”
“This might sound blasphemous, but the women in Mafia III and Luke Cage fascinate me most. These women are simultaneously complex and maddeningly shallow. I say this to mean there is centuries of tears, laughter, abuse, and love tied up in each and every one of them, but at the same time all of this history and all of these emotions all seem to (by design) fall in service to the narratives’ main male protagonists. ” – Samantha Blackmon, Not Your Mama’s Gamer
“This game is designed as a narrative investigation where you must piece together elements from the different applications, messages and pictures to progress. Scrolling through the phone’s content, you will find out everything about Laura: her friendships, her professional life and the events that led to her mysterious disappearance and the loss of this phone.” – Developer
“Everyone knows that the queen is the most dominant piece in chess, but few people know that the game existed for five hundred years without her. It wasn’t until chess became a popular pastime for European royals during the Middle Ages that the queen was born and was gradually empowered to become the king’s fierce warrior and protector.” – Publisher
“I’ve never had a baby. I once had one of those dolls that you could feed and it periodically pissed itself, but I gather this represents only a fraction of the maternal experience. I’ll tell you what I have done, though: I have played a lot of video games. And games, you may be startled to discover, are not too great at portraying motherhood – though they seem to have fatherhood all figured out.” – Kate Gray, The Guardian
“Suffragetto is a contest of occupation between two opposing factions, The Suffragettes and The Police. The goal of the Suffragettes is to break past Police lines and enter the House of Commons. At the same time, The Suffragettes must also prevent the Police from entering Albert Hall, an oft-used meeting space of the Women’s Social and Political Union.” – Official Rules (Revised)
“Emma Vossen’s love of gaming started when she was a kid growing up in small-town Ontario. Now as a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo Games Institute, she looks to gamer culture as a microcosm of how sexism is seeded and replicated within broader society, and she draws connections between gamer culture and the rise of the political extreme right. This is the latest in our Ideas from the Trenches series, exploring the exciting insights of PhD students across the country.” – CBC Ideas