Journal of Games Criticism
Open-access peer-reviewed journal (since 2014) that bridges academic game studies and popular games criticism.
Documents
The Man with the Gun is a Boy who Plays Games: Video Games, White Innocence, and Mass Shootings in the U.S.
The recurring tendency to blame video games for mass shootings in the United States functions as a strategic rhetorical device designed to preserve the concept of white innocence.
The Fight Is the Dance: Modding Chinese Martial Arts and Culture into Beat Saber
The Good Bag project serves as a critical exploration of how virtual reality modding can function as a vehicle for cultural preservation and social commentary.
Binaries on a Circle: Engaging Whiteness on the Playground
Traditional game studies often rely on rigid, binary frameworks such as colonizer versus colonized or white versus other, which fail to capture the fluid complexities of identity.
Pedagogical Encounters With Structural Whiteness in Games: Tales and Reflections From a Game Studies Classroom
Structural whiteness functions as a pervasive episteme within game studies, dictating the boundaries of legitimate knowledge by prioritizing technical production over critical inquiry.
Appropriation or Erasure? Imagining Indigenous Futures in Games
Mainstream video games frequently perpetuate settler-colonial ideologies by reducing Indigenous cultures to superficial aesthetic signifiers while simultaneously erasing the presence and history of actual Indigenous peoples.
An Affront to My People: Excising the Other from the Fantasy of Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim functions as a vehicle for racial essentialism and colonialist ideology, utilizing fantasy tropes to reinforce Eurocentric hierarchies.
Can 'Red Dead' Be Redeemed?: Race and Gameworld Contexts
Red Dead Redemption 2 functions as a case study for how contemporary interactive media reinforces a flawed American origin story by centering whiteness and maleness within the national imaginary.
On Cooking a Sour Game
Cook Your Way functions as a critical intervention in game design, utilizing an alternative controller and the preparation of traditional Brazilian cuisine to interrogate the dehumanizing mechanics of global immigration systems.