I had reason to return to Gary Alan Fines book “Shared Fantasy” about the social aspects of role-playing games recently. I didn’t get very far until the first reference of rape was made. Frequently male nonplayer characters who have not hurt the party are executed and female nonplayer characters raped for sport. There are additional... Continue Reading →
Untapped Markets
During the entire Sweden Game Conference, two themes stood out to me. Untapped markets and a sustainable way to work and create products. The first part was particularly interesting. Women are around 50% of the audience for games now. There’s no denying it or waving it away. And women make up only 20% of the... Continue Reading →
Reading Old Game Design Books…
... and getting pissed off. Or perhaps not so much pissed off as concerned about what those books taught new (and old) game designers only 5 - 10 years ago. Every book except a very recently published one is pretty consistently placing the player firmly in the “he” compartment. I’m about to start reading a... Continue Reading →
Do Not Forget
It has been a while since GamerGate. In the industry, time has passed. There are companies and developers who no longer were part of that painful and horrific time. They reclaimed Pepe the Frog and have no idea what seeing that frog as an emoji in a conversation is stressful and anxiety inducing. They didn’t... Continue Reading →
Comfort Games
I've been at Sweden Game Conference all week. I did a talk on UX workflows that I'll get back to later on. I did however have several conversations with a bunch of women in the games industry or about to go into the industry. One of the things we talked about was comfort games that... Continue Reading →
I Critique Because I Love
“You must really hate games”. No, not really. I actually love games. I love them so much that I want them to be better. We have this fear of criticizing games that I think are based on various things, but to make a long story short, this is my hypothesis: Games have been criticized for... Continue Reading →