Gaming the System

Fall In Non-fantasy roleplaying games don’t often allow the player to choose a race.  However, Fallout 3, Bethesda’s open world roleplaying game set in post-apocalyptic Washington DC, allows players to select from four races: African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic, with Caucasian—unfortunately but not unsurprisingly—the default choice. An explicit breakdown of races in this way, along lines [...]

Education Beyond Edu-games Researching and designing educational videogames continues to be one of the most popular forms of research within the critical tendency of game studies. Without question, the push to leverage the strong and unique persuasive and educational aspects of games via the design of new games is a worthwhile endeavor. However, focusing on [...]

I think it is important for those of us in media studies, and not just with a game studies focus, to teach how to “read” and interpret videogames given their budding status as one of the dominant media forms of the near future. This is particularly important if you subscribe to McKenzie Wark’s central argument [...]