Do not fear, gentle reader, I am not abandoning you. I will be gone for a week on a trip in the far north reaches while wild moose roam. I don’t expect to have Internet. I don’t even expect to have electricity. I will return on July 4th with a new post.
Allow me to reach forth to the realm of Platonic forms and grab therefrom a type of experience you are likely to have had or witnessed if you’re female. You’re at a party. It’s full of smart, interesting people because you are smart and interesting and like seeks like. Over by the olives with little […]
The Internet, and game worlds even more so, have become a third place. A third place is somewhere that isn’t home and isn’t work, but a semi-public place where one goes often and sees other people. The bar in the TV show Cheers was a third place. Coffee houses, gyms, city parks, and now, add […]
Feminists in the late 60s started formally getting together in groups to talk about the conditions of their life in order to analyze them politically. One of the keys to consciousness raising was that women felt isolated in their experiences (and were physically isolated from each other by the conditions under which many of their […]
This Feminist Gamer Bingo card is probably the best thing I’ve found on the Internet all week. Source: Rants of a Gamer Girl: Feminist Gamer Bingo! Last week, Jill at I Blame the Patriarchy, the number one patriarchy blaming blog on the blogosphere, encouraged her readers to share their stories about how they went from […]
Women get a lot of shit in the social space of games, just for being women. Every woman gamer has to have some strategy for dealing with sexual harassment and threats. Sometimes we get some really stupid advice. My favorite, stupidest piece of advice: don’t let anyone know you’re a woman. The only way it’s […]
There’s a feeling among some fans of Duke Nukem that anyone who dares to give a bad review to a Duke title simply doesn’t understand what the game is trying to do. We need to relax, goes the argument, relax enough to laugh at the rampant misogyny and hateful stereotypes on display throughout the game. […]
To pass the Maggie test a video game must have: a playable female character which is available to play right away, and not as a special bonus feature In a previous post, I alluded to this video game corollary to the Bechdel test. We talked about it a bit and my friend agreed to let […]
In 1986, my parents bought our first family computer. My first computer. We were living in a small village in Communist Poland. I’m not even sure if there was a second telephone there in addition to the one at the rural medical clinic where my parents worked. Yet, my dad, convinced that computers were the […]
The Problem With ‘Booth Babes’ While these jobs may provide lucrative networking opportunities, being a hot chick in a roomful of mostly geeky men is sure to promote misunderstandings. The article discusses the problems booth babes face while doing their job. No surprise, it’s a shitty job. The article talks also about dudes at the […]
