Emma Vossen

Nintendon’t

First Person Podcast Episode 7

Emma Vossen, Chris Lawrence, Alexandra Orlando, & Rob Parker

Instead of examining a specific game on Episode 7 of the First Person Podcast we turn a eye, an upraised eyebrow, and a single tear towards Nintendo and its recent decisions. Four disapointed Nintendo fans look at the many controversies and rumours currently surrounding both Nintendo as a company as well as their current and upcoming games. In this episode we cover the Fire Emblem localization, Nintendo’s lack of reaction to GamerGate, Nintendo firing Alison Rapp, the launch and staying power of Miitomo, and the rumours about implementing a choice between male and female link in the new Zelda game. Beyond this will also discuss larger issues of localization, how sexuality is depicted in games, and wonder how many different varieties of “hard core” gamers we’ve encountered. Continue Reading →

Publish or Perish?

Or Publish with Purpose?

Emma Vossen 9 Comments

If you are an academic you are probably achingly familiar with the phrase “publish or perish”, which has become the motto of our broken system. Publishing has become a numbers game and as someone in game studies, it’s hard not to see it as a game. If as a grad student you ask someone with a job how to get a tenure track job, they will often tell you the exact same things: “It’s very difficult to get a job but if you publish X many journal articles in journals of X quality and go to conferences X Y and Z and then cast your net wide enough you will get a job.” That is the formula I’ve heard 100 times: publishing along the party line = job. After you get a job, you might have to write a book to get tenure, but that book must be for an academic audience and must be published with a “good” academic publisher. Continue Reading →

“Bullet Feels”

First Person Podcast Episode 6

Emma Vossen, Betsy Brey, Shawn Dorey, Alex Fleck, & Phil Miletic

Episode 6 of the First Person Podcast will discuss the critical darling Undertale. We cover the attempts at gender neutrality, the ups and downs of pacifism, the anxiety produced when mixing bullet hell and RPG elements and the barriers to entry when playing such a meta game. This podcast is full of spoilers so we recommend you play Undertale first if you were planning on it. Continue Reading →

Interview with Christopher Park

CEO of Arcen Games

Christopher Park 1 Comment

One of the things that frustrates me with a lot of games that I play is when I see somebody have a cool idea and then they kind of nudge the idea, you know? And they’re like, “that’s nifty, now moving on” — it’s like whoa whoa whoa wait a second here. We tend to try not only just to fully explore whatever the idea is, but, if we’re given the chance and there’s a lot of community support and therefore post-release content is a thing that can happen then we’ll just keep on trucking and explore every permutation of that idea. I find that really interesting because those rabbit holes can go, just, I’ve never found the bottom of one. Continue Reading →

FPS 2.0

An introductory editorial from the new FPS EIC

Emma Vossen

Hi, I’m Emma and I’m the new Editor in Chief of FPS! After his many years as EIC, Steve Wilcox has graciously left this position to me after a few months of training. In fact, we (the outgoing editors of FPS) have been training a whole crop of new editors for the past few months in an effort to maintain FPS’s longevity. Student-run publications and programs have a habit of cropping up and then disappearing soon after their inception because fortunately/unfortunately people must eventually graduate. Many of our existing editors are now either in the process of graduating or have already graduated; they are looking for jobs or have already landed great ones and while this doesn’t mean they wanted to walk away from FPS it does mean they have less time to devote to it than those of us still picking away at our games related dissertations. This turnover is especially important if we want to keep up our current publishing schedule where we publish new games related content for our audience from a vast array of talented authors every Wednesday all year long (with a short break in august and december so we can all breathe). It’s not easy getting quality work out there every week, but we manage to do it without fail because of the devoted work of our (totally unpaid) hard-working editorial team. I owe a great debt to all the previous editors of FPS including Steve Wilcox, Jason Hawreliak, Michael Hancock, Kent Aardse and Meghan Blythe Adams for all their hard work on FPS making it what it is today. Keep your eyes peeled for great things from these fine folks! Continue Reading →

Intimate Publics

Towards Creating Supportive Spaces for Women in Games

Emma Vossen

You may have caught a piece we ran last week that discussed GamerGate broadly as a movement. This commentary is Part 2 of that piece and examines the divisions between people who play games from a more personal perspective. In this part, I illustrate my experiences as a member of the Games Institutes Janes (GI Janes) here at Uwaterloo as fodder. Furthermore, this piece also discusses the new direction we are taking the Commentaries here at FPS. Continue Reading →