what about what she wants?

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Worlds are made of stories. Video game worlds. Our world, too. Stories that justify why things are the way they are. Of course you have to kill the people standing between you and the end of the level. They’ll kill you if you don’t, and anyway, don’t worry, they’re bad.

These stories reinforce our ideas about good and evil, about male and female. They are deliberately constructed to leave no room to ask questions. So questioning them can be a radical act.

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Average Maria Individual is a game by Alice Maz. It uses the Mario mythos to encourage us to challenge the assumptions deeply rooted in the narratives and mechanics of so many games. You can download it here. I wrote about it a bit in this piece for VICE

Second Quest is a new graphic novel by Tevis Thompson and David Hellman. To quote from the About page on the official site, the project “began when Tevis wrote an essay called Saving Zelda in February 2012 and David drew a landscape in response.  From there, they began to discuss ideas for a story that would offer an alternate take on a familiar legend.  They imagined a comic that would express some of their frustrations with videogames and the insular culture surrounding them but also resonate with similar dynamics in the wider world.”