Episodes
Thursday Oct 19, 2017
Thursday Oct 19, 2017
Andrea Ayres, creator of The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne, makes me feel a lot of things about hot cereal. The making of the Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne shows that oatmeal has more to do with grief and game development than you might expect. Born on the heels of grief at the loss of a parent, and influenced by Andrea's personal experiences with social anxiety and an eating disorder, The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne is an interactive story about a painfully introverted college student who needs to make oatmeal in the communal kitchen of her dorm. While the game challenges you to find the right words to help Samantha as she embarks on her journey to the other side of her bedroom door, the development of the game itself challenged Andrea to explore her own relationship with mental health, anxiety, and loss.
This episode is part one of the “Developer Doldrums” series, a collection of conversations with game developers about the not-so-happy bits that hide behind the curtain of our digital play objects.
Andrea Ayres is a founder and the head writer at Lemonsucker Games. She also writes about politics and representation in pop-culture and beyond. She enjoys coffee, cats, and phasing between inter-dimensional realities.
Stuff we mentioned...
The Average Everyday Adventures of Samantha Browne
Eating Disorders
Social Anxiety
Schlesinger's Cat
Destiny 2
Journey
Brie Code on the concepts of "Tend-and-Befriend" and "Fight-or-Flight" in video games
Samantha Browne at Indiecade 2016
JD (The Broad)
Website: GamingBroadly.com
Twitter: @JayDeeCepticon
Instagram: @JayDeeCepticon
Andrea Ayres (The Cast)
Twitter: @missafayres
Instagram: @afad435
Website: Ayresdeets.com
Lemonsucker Games: lemonsuckergames.com
Gaming Broad(cast) is the official podcast of GamingBroadly.com. Thank you to everyone who has liked, subscribed, and commented about Gaming Broad(cast) on Apple Podcasts! You can also follow this podcast on Spotify, Podbean, Stitcher, Google Music, or subscribe directly using our RSS feed. Want some gamey goodness in your email inbox? Sign up for some occasional(ly) playful newsletter updates. Thanks to Los Kurados for the use of their song "Rojo Y Azul" for the intro and outro music of our podcast.
Thursday Oct 05, 2017
Ep. 14: The Violent Femmes of Women's Rugby (Violence & Video Games Part 5)
Thursday Oct 05, 2017
Thursday Oct 05, 2017
There’s a lot of assumptions folks make about violence and video games, from beliefs that violence in video games cause real life violent crime, to the stereotype that violence in video games is intended only for our more dudely players. But what about the violence that happens in real life sports? Does tackling and dragging someone to the ground for a ball make you more likely to tackle and drag someone to the ground out in the real world? And do women really like all that brutal physicality anyways?
As far as brutality goes, the sport of rugby is about as brutal as they come. Sometimes it hurts to watch rugby, much less play it. Legend has it that rugby was invented in England in 1823, when William Webb Ellis decided the rules of soccer (“football”) didn’t apply to him, picked up the ball with his hands, and ran the length of the pitch to score the first ever try. The Tulane Women’s Rugby Team follows in this great rugby tradition of smashing expectations, and are currently ranked third in the country after only two years of competitive play. This week we're joined by members of Tulane University's Women's Rugby Team, Emma Peterson and Hayley Alexander. Emma and Hayley want folks to know that there's more than meets the eye when it comes to the "violence" in rugby, and that the respect and comraderie of rugby is actually the selling point of the sport... not the bruises and the black eyes (however fetching they can be).
Unfortunately, Hayley and Emma have found that rugby isn’t always thought of as a “women’s sport”, mostly due to assumptions about what genders are interested in physically brutal gameplay. And when people DO think of women rugby players, they often assume the women are all hyper-masculine drunken lesbians who are into bar fights. While there undoubtedly are rugby women who fall into those categories ("shoot the boot" is a real and terrifying thing, apparently), Hayley and Emma discuss some of the stereotype-shattering aspects of the women’s rugby community, from teams filled to the brim with sorority girls, to winning kicking competitions at rugby tournaments in pencil skirts.
Emma Peterson, originally from Northern California, is a graduate student at Tulane University, getting her M.A. in English. She plays for Tulane Women's Rugby Club.Stuff we mentioned...
How to Play Rugby
Tulane University
Rugby Ball
Moon Walking
Shoot the Boot
JD (The Broad)
Website: GamingBroadly.com
Twitter: @JayDeeCepticon
Instagram: @JayDeeCepticon
Tulane Women's Rugby Club (The Cast)
Facebook: TulaneUWRFC
Instagram: @Tulanewrfc
Website: www.tulanewrfc.wixsite.com/tuwrfc
Gaming Broad(cast) is the official podcast of GamingBroadly.com. Thank you to everyone who has liked, subscribed, and commented about Gaming Broad(cast) on Apple Podcasts! You can also follow this podcast on Spotify, Podbean, Stitcher, Google Music, or subscribe directly using our RSS feed. Want some gamey goodness in your email inbox? Sign up for some occasional(ly) playful newsletter updates. Thanks to Los Kurados for the use of their song "Rojo Y Azul" for the intro and outro music of our podcast.