“Hmm, is this image perhaps inappropriate for the Batgirl comic?” Maybe ask these questions BEFORE soliciting your product, DC.

I wasn’t going to blog about the decision to pull a variant cover for Batgirl #41. I’m not a reader of the comic, and Twitter user @JennOfHardwire has already done a good job going over it from the perspective of a fan of the franchise. 

But then I started seeing comments about how the decision to pull a controversial variant cover after internet outrage wasn’t *really* censorship, because: The cover was off-brand. It’s a bad choice for a youth-targeted book like Batgirl. The artist himself agreed to pull it, etc. etc. etc.

This…really bothers me. I think all of the above can be true, yet refusing to publish a piece of art due to complaints is still censorship.

Continue reading Nope, Still Censorship, Batgirl →

Regular readers of this blog may be scratching their heads at the title. “But Karen, don’t you hate the world problematic?” Well yes, I do. However, the launch of Offworld— a new gaming site that claims to be “an unequivocal home for women and minorities”— reminds me of Girlamatic.com, a now-defunct site that was meant to be for webcomics “(mostly!) by and (mostly!) for” women. For some reason, the title of an article critical of the site* from vaguely 2001-ish, titled “The Problematic Launch of Girlamatic.com,” has stuck in my mind, some fourteen years later. That was about the last time you could use problematic before it just got silly, I think. In any case, Offworld reminds me of my thoughts at that time, so it just felt like an apt title, out-of-character as it may be. Continue reading The Problematic Launch of Offworld.com →

Game designer Jonathan Blow is getting people riled up today with this quote:

“If every movie were a porn movie, most people wouldn’t see movies. The majority of games are basically porn—the onus is on us to make more things that are worth a reasonable person’s time.”

To give Blow’s view proper consideration, he’s not saying that “porn,” or games as they are now, shouldn’t exist– just that they shouldn’t make up such a large percentage of the gaming landscape. I can agree with that much, certainly. The idea that gaming as a medium could be offering a much wider variety of experiences than it does currently is hardly a new or radical idea; in fact, I remember the staff of Electronic Gaming Monthly writing sundry editorials about that all the way back in the ’90s.

Where I part ways with Blow is the supposition that games as they are now aren’t “worth a reasonable person’s time”– implying (or I guess, outright stating, really), that people who enjoy today’s games are unreasonable people. Putting aside the fact that that’s just begging for a George Bernard Shaw-inspired burn, as one of the so-called unreasonable people, I would like to make a case for the value of unreasonability. Continue reading Games and the Value of Comfort Zones →