Over on NewGrounds, there’s a a short autobiographical game by Auntie Pixellante called Dys4ia. It’s a pixelly, Flash-based WarioWare-style game, played only with the arrow keys, chronicling the experiences of a trans woman in rectifying her own dysphoria.
I don’t want to spoil it overly much. It’s short, not difficult (except maybe emotionally), and well worth your time. Go play it.
Remember that Wind Waker hack I told you about recently, where a young girl’s father — who’d been changing Link’s gender on the fly for his daughter while reading it to her — decided to make things simpler for himself by hacking the rom script?
Another father was asked by his daughter if she could play one of her favorite games, the original Donkey Kong, as Pauline instead of Mario. So, he hacked the rom (very probably from the WiiWare version, judging by the 2010 copyright), editing all the frames of animation for both Mario and Pauline to switch their roles.
Doesn’t change the functionality of the game at all, just the aesthetics. In such simple games, only in a society that prescribes strongly-defined gender roles would the default hero be a man and the default “damsel” be a woman. And yet, in an alternate universe where this was released instead of the one with Mario (or Jumpman) as the hero, I wager it would not have sold as well because video games, even back then, were already being pigeonholed as a “guy thing”.
Who knows, though. Maybe, MAYBE, inverting the Damsel In Distress trope, making the girl the one with agency and the guy the one forced to helplessly stand at the top of the building with Donkey Kong, might have been a blow struck for equality and perhaps the video game industry would have turned out much different. Perhaps.
Thanks to the dozen or so folks who kept pointing this out!
If this is true — and I have to admit more than a little skepticism about this, given the just-so story near the end — it could be the single biggest medical breakthrough in decades. You know how in Mass Effect, characters can take life-threatening damage and after one little button-press, they’re right back in the fight? Bullet wounds, rockets, whatever — just slap on your medi-gel dispenser button and your armor seals up the wound and lets you keep fighting.
A grad student has supposedly taken that Mass Effect equivalent of a magic healing potion, Medi-Gel, and turned it into a reality.
It is a synthetic version of the extracellular matrix (ECM) that holds our cells together and tells them what to do in the event of a bleeding injury, instructing them to get clotting. It also binds together with the damaged ECM cells of the patient, working with them to form a seal over the area of the wound.
Dense, information-packed, well-researched, correct in all its particulars, and can’t possibly exist. My search engine hits for “Anita Sarkessian scam” tell me so.
Sultan’s daughter, Prince Of Persia Classic (2007)
Anita Sarkeesian, the controversial feminist critic whose plans to produce a crowdfunded video series about female tropes in video games led to someone creating a video game all about punching her in the face, is almost ready to show her work.
Alex Jones’ unhinged rant on Piers Morgan’s show, where the interviewer got maybe one question answered out of the three he managed to ask, tells me why I got a comment the other day demanding the rounding up and burning of antidepressants. There is now apparently a parallel narrative forming where antidepressants are responsible for mental instability, and that, combined with video games, induces people to obtain high-volume weaponry and commit mass-murder. And any attempt at taking away guns, instead of video games and antidepressants, is an attempt at creating a totalitarian single world government.
I’ve tried a number of times to play the in-browser Flash game, braving their site’s unfortunate overuse of clipart, but it fails to load repeatedly at the G in “Loading”. So I’ve had to settle for checking this out via Youtube.
This is very self-evidently a propaganda piece, to try to sell North Korea’s tourism market, but I have to give them credit for making a fairly good game for their first outing. Sure, it’s rather dull, with static cars as the only obstacle, and the only goal to pick up petrol drums and collectible placards that both show a landmark and a short piece of text chastizing you for your poor driving skills. And that’s not to mention the female traffic cop who appears on occasion to tell you not to look at her. But all in all, there’s a lot that’s laudable from a startup even where there’s a lot that’s laughable. I hope they learn from this and make another attempt. And I certainly hope it brings a little money into their wealth-starved country — from which most of the injustices of their totalitarian government likely flow.
Their about us page indicates, to me, why said government might have been interested in them. I can guarantee that “secrecy” is not a selling point over here, so much as an unfortunate reality.
Thirty miles south of Newtown, Connecticut, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, a tiny township called Southington is preparing to deal with the aftermath of said shooting and end the scourge of violence among youths by… you guessed it… amassing, destroying and burning violent video games.
Following the shooting, Southington School superintendent Joe Erardi said that he was flooded with emails from concerned parents asking what could be done to help both the nearby Newtown community and their own.
“What happened in our community, very similar to communities across the world, is everyone wanted to do something for Newtown,” he said. The SOS “convened and we looked at how do we continue to pray and support Newtown and how do we do something perhaps meaningful for Newtown and our own community.”
