Over the past month I’ve been playing through Valve’s Half Life: Alyx in my free time. For those unfamiliar, Alyx is a a prequel to Valve’s hugely successful and influential Half Life 2, but more importantly, it is the first… Continue Reading
On this week’s episode of The Arena, Erik, Kelly, and I discussed wonky character design, the failures of multinational corporations, and the phenomenon of using Twitch as a marketing platform. If this doesn’t quite make it clear: on this week’s… Continue Reading
I had a plan to write on Rayman Legends, a game we played on March 4th on the Lunch Zone with Nathan, Thomas, Janelle, David, Krista-Lee, Erik, and me (Laya). It was a good day. It was David’s first stream,… Continue Reading
Just a little background: I’m new to the group and I’ve only been part of three Lunch Zones at this point. So I won’t be talking about streaming as part of Serious Play, but rather about me and my friends… Continue Reading
In this midst of this quarantine, I’ve decided to turn back to my gaming roots, so to speak. I’ve been craving a good hyper-realistic shooter recently because, for me, the (broad and largely undefined/unexamined) genre has significant nostalgic value. For… Continue Reading
In January for The Arena I challenged myself to play Celeste (2018) as fast as I could. I had just finished the game for the first time at the end of December and was looking for a game to speedrun,… Continue Reading
So I figured I’d do something different this week and talk about the importance of Serious Play beyond its academic endeavors. Transcript: So I know the overall tone of this blog is academic because that’s sort of what we’re here to… Continue Reading
[Cross-posted to ludoscholar.net] This week on Coffee Break, I finally played the game that I’ve been talking about for weeks: Yoku’s Island Express. For me, this game excels on a lot of fronts. First, it’s an unlikely mash-up of the… Continue Reading
This week on Board Meeting, special guests Kristine and Kelsey joined Dave, Janelle and I to play the movie-themed card games Cinephile (designed by Cory Everett and illustrated by Steve Isaacs) and Double Feature (designed/illustrated by John Kovalic) to celebrate… Continue Reading
The 2010s have come and gone and as always there are a lot of retrospective lists coming out ranking the “best” games, albums, movies, shows, and whatnot of the decade. I figured instead of trying to delineate what games were… Continue Reading