Author: Auriea

Right, so MTV’s Multiplayer blog has been posting interviews with women in the game industry all week. Today, they interview Brenda Braithwaite. She’s awesome! She’s been working on games for 26 years. Interestingly, she has a very uncommon focus.

She’s written the book on Sex in Video Games.

….. (a) massive overview of everything there is to know about sex in games, from this whole detailed history of the “Hot Coffee” incident in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” to the detailed history of early sex games to the modern history of sex games.

from the interview:

…I want to make sure that we have the full range of the human experience to choose from. And the one that people go after the most is sex. That’s not true. I shouldn’t say that. That’s just in my experience because that’s what I’m always defending. People go after sex and violence in games, and while we may never need either extreme, we should have a right to have them. When our storytelling gets to the point where we can do our own “Sopranos,” we can do “The Godfather,” we can do “Sideways,” we can do a “Brokeback Mountain.” We should have the full range of human experience. It’s an art form like any other art form. For me, that’s the importance of preserving it.

Excellent 😉
A very long good read.

Trigger Happy, originally published in 2000 with the subtitle “The Inner Life of Videogames”, is a book about the aesthetics of videogames: what they share with other artforms, and the ways in which they are unique.

And now the book is available as a free download from author Steven Poole’s website. I’ve not read it yet, but from a quick browse it seems like a good one. The aesthetics of video games (not just dealing with how they look) is an under-discussed subject.

And while you’re at his site anyway, you might want to give his archive of articles originally written for Edge magazine a look. He writes in a very provocative, very real way about the games he plays and video game culture.

got via wmmna