This week my colleague, Mark Filipowich, wrote an article discussing how female characters serve not merely as objects in video games, but as objectives (“Searching for the Other Castle: Women as Objectives”, PopMatters, 19 February 2013).  This is a topic that I have written about a few times myself (see, for example, ”Other Princesses, Other Castles: The Problem with Playing Romantically in Video Games “, PopMatters, 25 October 2011), and thus, I agree with a number of Filipowich’s observations.  Near the end of the article he posits that “[g]ames are not just for teenage boys,” a fair enough assessment of the current state of video games, and then follows up with the claim that “[g]ames have never been just for teenage boys,” which is also a true statement but one that does ignore some of the cultural history surrounding the development of video games, a history that might be relevant in understanding some of the frustration that some critics feel about video games and their representations of gender.

In light of the fast approach of the release of Anita Sarkesian’s “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” series, concern about sexism in video games is a sleepless dog ready to get back to barking soon.

In recent years, there has been an increasing outcry against the sexual harassment that inundates the industry and community, it’s something that more and more people are paying attention to (no matter how hard they try not to). But curiously, no matter how fiercely critics react to the poor treatment of women, the portrayal of female characters in AAA games seems actually to be getting worse. Women are almost entirely unrepresented, and when they are represented, they exist only as a player objective.

This week Nick, Jorge, and I revisit one of the bigger holiday releases of 2012, Assassin’s Creed 3, the conclusion of the game’s first story arc and the introduction of an assassin that we aren’t quite sure that we’ve figured out.

With Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft presents their vision of an American Revolution.  But is the fifth time out all that revolutionary?

Good characters can enliven even the worst of stories, and the one thing better than watching good characters is watching good characters interact with each other. One of the best things about any BioWare game is the emergent conversations between characters. But that kind of adaptable incidental dialogue seems (to me, at least) solely the domain of the RPG, a genre that’s partly defined by your acquisition of a rotating roster of characters. The action game, on the other hand, seems defined by its linearity—all the way down to your party members. Binary Domain switches things up ever-so-slightly by applying the idea of squad choice to a very traditional cover-based third person shooter and the result is something of a revelation: a linear action game that feels significantly affected by my decisions.

The release of Dead Space 3 brings with it the well-worn discussion of cooperative horror games. For the first time in the series, Isaac Clarke teams up with Sergeant John Carver to offer players a cooperative xenomorph-killing extravaganza. For a vocal bunch of players, the additional company might be fun, but saps the game of its horror roots. Pushed by popular discourse, I fear we may settle on the false assumption that horror and co-op gaming are simply incompatible. While most conversations pit co-op play against “isolation” and “immersion”, I think we can find a place for multiplayer horror games by balancing vulnerability and mutual reliance in games.