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1. Anastasia Salter
@anasalter

3. 10 Best Reviewed Games of 2016, GameSkinny.com
…but I am exhausted by AAA games.

4. “Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War”
Laurie Penny
Boing Boing
This is a culture war. The right side is winning, at great cost…We are winning. We
are winning because we are more resourceful, more compassionate, more
culturally aware. We're winning because we know what it's like to fight through
adversity, through shame and pain and constant reminders of our own
worthlessness, and come up punching. We know we're winning because the
terrified rage of a million mouthbreathing manchild misogynists is thick as nerve
gas in the air right now.
Us Social Justice Warriors—this is me, stealing that word in order to use it against
my enemies- are winning the culture war by tearing up the rulebook, and there's
nothing the sad, mad little boys who hate women and queers and people of colour
can do about it. Nothing, at least, that doesn't sabotage their strategy, because
they can win their game from day to day, but they're losing the war. They can
punish me for writing this, and I'm sure they will, but that will only prove my point.
I'm not afraid anymore.

5. If Player One is the—-also designed—-
white, cis--, heterosexual, young, abled,
and middle--class male, then Player Two
becomes his counterpart as a mode of
designed identity…the games made for
Player Two appear to be limiting and
limited—-small in scope and absurd in
meaning. These games do not appear to
be about life--and--death issues; they
represent small stories with small
outcomes. And yet these games are
important.
Shira Chess

6. "...the visual novel overtly calls upon players to
participate in the production of the text as
integrated agents. In placing the interactor in a
finely grained imaginary setting wherein he or she
is required to deploy both text-analysis
capabilities and puzzle-solving skills, the visual
novel forges an innovative way of presenting and
receiving the narrative experience" (Cavallaro
2009, 9)

8. "While it seems that a definition of 'fictional love'
via the concept of empathy can be sustained,
when read in relation to the distinction between
real, virtual, and fictional, it would imply
translating straightforwardly, and perhaps also
unsustainably, the ontic properties of the
emotions' objects into qualities of the emotional
experience" (Leino 2014, 169).

10. Smaller games with smaller budgets and
smaller audiences have the luxury of
being more experimental or bizarre or
interesting than 12 million dollar games
that need to play it as safely as possible
to ensure a return on investment.
Anna Anthropy

11. Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014
Jeremy Douglass proposes three distinct areas of
code as feminist act: code feminism, which is made
to be used and executed for a feminist purpose;
feminist codework, which is code-like but not
intended to be run; and feminist code, which is
“executable, syntactically subversive embedded
language or new programming [code] languages
affording a fundamentally different feminist
paradigm for software development.

12. REN’PY

13. Edmond Chang's critiques of existing "queergaming"
notes that many attempts at inclusivity and representation
fail because they are embedded in gaming systems that
still demand and reward traditional types of play: more
meaningful queergaming demands "a refusal of the idea
that digital games and gaming communities are the sole
provenance of adolescent, straight, white, cisgender,
masculine, able, male, and "hardcore" bodies and desires
and the articulation of and investment in alternative
modes of play and ways of being" (2017).

14. Dream Daddy
Game Grumps

15. In an interview, designer Leighton Gray noted her
attention to both defy stereotypes and avoid
using sexuality as an archetype: "We were
determined to not make any of the dads'
individual paths about their sexuality or have their
sexuality be their defining trait…We can have
narratives that are about queer people that are
not necessarily about being queer. It's about
these relationships" (Hudson 2017).

17. This complication can lead to assumptions about how
these characters are actually portrayed, as one
commentator articulated in a discussion of the game's
balance of representation:
"You and I (and lots of people!) have talked before about
these sorts of games about gay men that don't seem to be
geared toward gay men, and that really frustrates me
personally. But when I see certain things in the game—this
idea of gay dads being these sort of paper dolls you can
play with—I'm torn between being annoyed and just
being like 'well, that's the genre!' I can't, like, open up
some bodice-ripper romance and then complain that
everyone keeps ruining their clothes" (Jackson 2017).

19. "The game also presents queer relationships in a
way that is uniquely fannish — specifically very
close to queer shipping and slash fanfiction, queer
male romance written primarily by women for
other women. The characters, as in many slash
fics, exist in a distorted version of reality where
everyone is gay and homophobia doesn't seem to
exist" (Romano 2017).

21. "You can try to impress the music nerd or the
academic with knowledge you don't have, but
chances are your fakery will fall flat. You might
think that the best way to win points with a
standoffish dad is through sarcasm; once you
learn his backstory, however, you find that what
he really wants is kindness. The heartaches and
emotional wounds of the men you pursue are not
obstacles to be overcome en route to sex, but
rather fragments of real humanity that make them
even more lovable—and often force you to
reexamine your own intentions" (Hudson 2017).

23. Thank you!
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter