Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Here’s a trick question. What happens when you give GamerGate panelists almost everything they want at AirPlay? They threaten to quit. Last night was the strangest and saddest in my three-month-long descent into GamerGate. It began with AirPlay panelist Oliver Campbell calling to tell me, earnestly and weirdly, “My wife wants to kick your ass” and he feels like a…
Kids are fed up with Kate Upton. When the ads for Game of War started showing up on my students’ phones last year—they haven’t stopped—many were annoyed. They hated that it was impossible to close the ad, forcing them instead to watch the video until the end. But what really irritated them was Ms. Upton,…
Dubious game developers and Twitter trolls will now have to look elsewhere for backup when it comes to telling us “SJWs” that there’s nothing wrong with the portrayal of women in video games. A survey found that most teenage boys—despite common wisdom to the contrary—don’t want women to be over-sexualized in their video games. I’ll…
E3 recently passed and featured a decent showing of games with either exclusively female leads, or games that included the option to choose between a man and a woman. Maybe that’s a sign more companies are listening to all the players who are asking why games can’t be more inclusive. Still, there are plenty of…
Special message for automatic login ID change Blocking trauma with coloured blocks (Image: Oli Scarff/Getty) Manoeuvring the colourful tiles of Tetris can help block flashbacks of traumatic events, even after the memory has fixed itself in your mind. Playing the game could be an easy way to reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)….
This weekend, the Neopets forums got very active. Perhaps, the most active in a long time. Neopets is a virtual pet web game. Kids play it. It’s probably the least vulgar thing you can imagine. But, if you’ve ventured into ventured into the Neopets forums over the past 24 hours, you’d see thread titles like…
Publisher Warner Bros says they’re taking the drastic step of suspending all sales of Arkham Knight on PC until the game’s technical woes can be addressed. A statement just posted on the company’s forums reads: Dear Batman: Arkham Knight PC owners, We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with…
Thorlar Thorlarian describes himself as a “Pixel Art King,” and that’s not an empty boast. Witness his recreation of this BlizzCon 2010 wallpaper in Minecraft: It’s made up of over 1.1 million blocks, and took him more than 23 weeks to create. Even crazier, he did the entire thing by hand, without the aid of…
Faces and skin tones? Just the beginning. Now we’re getting to the real meat of the conversation. Beware: NSFW. Multiplayer survival game Rust (you know, the one from the dude who created Garry’s Mod; I think his name is Jeff or something) randomly generates players’ physical characteristics for them, imitating the screaming chaos of biology…
This week, a storm of anger has enveloped the Destiny community. This particular storm was brought about by a specific thing that happened last week. But in truth, it’s been brewing for much longer. Last week at E3, Bungie was showing off The Taken King, the new expansion for Destiny. We saw and played a…