Gone Home

Just about a year since the beginning of the Gamergate “controversy,” conditions for women in gaming are, in many ways, as bleak as ever. I use the quotation marks to denote the absurdity of the situation, as whatever legitimate issues may have once lay at its heart were quickly subsumed by bigots seeking an opportunity to spread hate speech. To this day, insightful and outspoken women such as Anita Sarkeesian and Zoê Quinn continue to be bombarded with violent and misogynistic remarks on Twitter and elsewhere on a regular basis.

“A Steam sale!” you gasp. Or perhaps you just opened your email to discover that one of the items on your Wishlist is currently on special. Maybe you heard about a new Humble Bundle, one that contains a few gems that you have yet to play. In any of these situations, the standard emotion is, of course, joy. However that excitement can be quickly tempered by the absence of three important words: “full controller support”.

As a teenager, I felt I would never age. Yet I also knew I would, and more than that, I could anticipate that when I did, everything would change. So I stood then, with confused ideas about time. The future would never arrive, yet it was also imminent. Now, my teenage years were horribly boring and sexless, so I was certainly looking forward to some sort of revolution. It was only a matter of emerging out the far side of high school, into the end of the world as I knew it. Life is a succession of points of no return, and if we find apocalyptic stories about crashing asteroids and alien invasions so absorbing, it might be because they exaggerate this fact. Popular fiction brims with characters who undergo processes of self-discovery while everything around them burns, from The Lord of the Rings to Akira. Watershed moments can be as monumental as they can be personal and private, and though graduating high school or parting with your family are not exactly comparable to a tidal wave, such commonplace events can inspire fear and trembling regardless.

2013 has been an interesting year as far as gaming has been concerned.  Not only have there been some new and interesting games as well as sequels to popular franchises, we have also seen the release of new gaming consoles — both big and small.  The Sony and Microsoft juggernauts have unleashed their new machines …