Tag Archives: gaming

Staff Writer | Girls Go to War, Pt. 2

Hello again, folks.  In my last post I talked about a subject near and dear to my heart:  war games, both table top miniatures and board games. I also noted the absence of women and girls as players on these games. I set out to see if I could glean a reason for this phenomenon, and had a couple of female gamers place a war game called Command and Colors Ancients.

To me this is an interesting subject to talk about because it seems to be one of those few things, even with the current trend of girls and women entering what were mostly male activities and hobbies, that is still mostly untouched by females. While I don’t think there really is a nature vs nurture fight (this is to say I don’t think it can be 100% one or the other: it is likely both) I do think every now and again we run face first in to the wall of nature. It just might be that war games offer just that wall, but also a window to which we can look at ourselves. Continue reading

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Filed under Gaming, Geek Life, Joseph De Paul

Staff Writer | Girls Go to War, Pt. 1

Now-a-days it is very hard to be a part of anything geeky without the topic of gender/sex coming up. It’s a topic I am fascinated with. Fans of things like comics, video games, or action movies are stereotyped as overweight, socially awkward man-children. Of course, this is not a perfect representation of geeks, as anyone who reads this site could tell you.

Joan-of-Arc-in-Battle

Joan of Arc

However, one can’t escape the fact that boys tend to outnumber girls by a wide margin in other areas of geekdom. One of the place where this is most apparent is among the very niche genre of war-gaming. especially table top and board games. While the gals have proliferated almost every other realm of geekdom, however this is one in which their presence is almost non-existent. I want to figure out why, if possible and what it tells us, if anything? Continue reading

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Filed under Gaming, Joseph De Paul

Guest Blog| Timeless Gaming: the lure of retro games

They say you can’t go back.  Usually “they” are referring to specific life event:  high school, the first car, or that one sweet summer where everything was perfect.   Gamers can’t go back either.  Once or twice a year a friend or two proposes to hook up that old NES or Genesis console and do some hard core retro gaming to relive the “good old days” when   games were innocent and pure and brand new.  Everyone’s list is different, but there are some games that appear on more lists than others: Battletoads, Bionic Commando, Blaster Master, Final Fantasy, and Super Mario Bros are just a few of these. All were very good games for their time.  I admit that I have attempted to do a little retro-gaming from time to time, but more often than not I end up disappointed and bored after an hour or two into what was supposed to be an all night gaming session. Continue reading

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Filed under Gaming, Guest Blog, Kurt Klein

Guest Blog | How is Model UN like D&D?

That’s not the beginning of a joke, it’s the premise of today’s post by first time guest writer Ani Sinani, who participated in an Ad-Hoc Model UN committee this spring and was struck by its similarities to table-top and role-playing games.

Earlier this year, I participated in a Model United Nations (MUN) conference in Chicago. For those of you who don’t know, MUN is a competition in which students assume roles as the ambassadors of world nations and simulate UN committees. The same structure is used for non-traditional committees, where students usually assume the roles of high officials to simulate business committees, wars, presidential elections, and so on. So yes, you can definitely say that MUN is glorified role-playing. In Chicago, I participated in the Ad-Hoc committee, which is usually composed of the top student delegates in the country. The topic of the committee was not disclosed prior to the conference and no one knew what character they would be representing. Continue reading

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Filed under Gaming, Geek Life, Guest