Tag: representation

News

Old Man’s Journey, a beautifully slow game about nearing the end of life

In a market oversaturated with dark shooters and bright pixels, calm games can seem few and far between. Enter Old Man’s Journey, a beautiful upcoming game by Viennese studio Broken Rules that is exactly what the title describes. The teaser trailer, released last Thursday, features a cute, white-bearded old man—our assumed protagonist—and the gorgeous seaside city he’s wandering through. The tagline describes it as a game about life, loss and hope, “a final chance to seek amends and find your heart, once lost at sea.” The chalky art style and sweet little drawings befit a steadier pace, so there’s no…
Feature

The videogame that dares to tackle African politics

Videogames have a problem with how they portray Africa—the continent often appears as nothing more than a stereotypical warzone. The most egregious example is 2009’s Resident Evil 5, which included an unnamed African locale with a conspicuously incensed mob united under an unconvincing explanation of undeadness as an excuse for white protagonist Chris Redfield to shoot every local he sees. A more recent slight was the Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012) mission” Pyrrhic Victory”, where combatants of the Angolan Civil War are portrayed as machete-wielding maniacs charging at each other in a dusty battlefield. The portrayal was so…
Review

Everyone should be squirming to play Push Me Pull You

Sweating, writhing, fleshy worms are locked in combat with each other. Their two heads and four arms struggle to maintain dominance over one another. It’s a vicious and gross game of sport. And yet it is somehow completely, utterly adorable. Push Me Pull You lands somewhere between sumo wrestling, a soccer match, and the body-horror nightmare of The Human Centipede (2010). It has two teams of two players competing to gain control of the ball on a playfield, each pair working together to wriggle their conjoined bodies cooperatively to score points. The maneuvers available to each player at either end…
Badiya
News

Badiya hopes to change Arabic representation in videogames

“Sometimes showing things just the way they really are is the biggest contribution you can make toward the cause,” explains Ahmad Jadallah, the director of development at Saudi Arabian studio Semaphore. He’s looking to help fix representation of the Arab world in videogames, and hopes that his team’s upcoming survival game Badiya will be able to do just that. Badiya looks to capture a key point in the desert’s history as it takes place just after the events of the first World War. Those familiar with Saudi Arabia’s establishment as a kingdom will know this period as when the unification…
News

Women redesign female characters to show what videogames are missing out on

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own When Virginia Woolf was asked…