Reading “Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet” put me through a whirlwind of emotions, which changed (almost) as quickly as the temperature on a spring day in Amherst. At first, I was sad and disappointed– we won’t be able to preserve our experiences for future generations? People who live a thousand years from now…
Reading “You Had to Be There” gave me intense flashbacks to my thesis. My thesis was about the contemporary revival of Confucianism in China. Comparing the Confucian revival to other religious and nationalist revivals around the world — including the boom of spirituality in the West since the 1980s– I conclude that they all stem…
Last class, Professor asked a question that stuck with me: what are the most inclusive games? That led to a few spin-off questions in my brain: what determines how inclusive a game is? Is what I experience to be inclusive necessarily so for everyone, since I perceive that it should be? I immediately thought about…
While reading Adrienne Shaw’s article, “On Not Becoming Gamers,” I found myself agreeing with her point that the construction of the “gamer” identity limits the range of narratives and diversity of texts available in the gaming industry. This is because the gamer identity is constructed in a very narrow manner– traditionally, “gamers” have been white,…
Is Pokémon Go racist? That depends. There are two definitions of racism: one societal, the other individual. Societally speaking, racism is the oppression of one race by a dominant race(s). Individually speaking, racism is discrimination based on race. Pokémon Go is racist in the first sense– none of the developers (presumably) meant to make their…
Twine was one of my first true loves, along with Ren’Py. When I was 14 or 15 and I began wanting to transition from writing stories to writing game stories, Twine and Ren’Py were easy and accessible, with the right amount of programming to teach me something, but not too much that it was impossible to…
So far in this class, we have played a variety of games dealing with moral choices as well as discussed them in class. As I see it, it’s possible to divide games with a moral aspect into three categories: (1) social issue games, which deal explicitly with issues with a moral dimension, and make this…
As, perhaps, the first obvious choice presented in The Stanley Parable, the choice to enter the left or right door presents an opportunity for the player to adhere to what has been dictated as the game’s story, or rebel against the narrator and assert their own volition. While this offers the opportunity for a player…
