Uncategorized | Mouse Smash

July 1, 2017
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A Midyear Resolution: Diversify Your Gaming Experience with One Simple Trick

I have played video games since I was three years old, when my mother brought home an Apple IIe computer, and loaded up Pac-Man for me. From there, I went from playing a range of games like Tonk in the Land of Buddy-Bots and the Monkey Island series, to console titles such as Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed and Halo.

But here’s one thing I’ve noticed: my favorite games will, more often than not, have a protagonist that looks nothing like me. Where games have a single playable character, that playable character is likely to be a man. A white man. Maybe he has a beard, maybe not. He’s probably also straight–perhaps he also has a wife or child or someone close to him who’s died or been kidnapped at the start of the game as a plot device, and he’s probably armed with some sort of gun or melee weapon or both. Continue reading →

September 1, 2016
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Adventures in QA: Chapter 6: Work-related Microaggressions

So at work I am on a team where we have a lot of disciplines represented. There’s design and art and production and test and whatnot. It’s pretty cool. We are all considered experts in our field and the team works together because everyone brings their mad skillz to the table as it were.

Or so I thought. So, we’ve had a few issues with one of our tools lately and our investigations haven’t brought about any answers. We referred it to an engineer outside our team who gave us an explanation about it. Unfortunately, that explanation was wrong. Continue reading →

May 22, 2016
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Adventures in QA: Chapter 5: Competitive Pricing, or Lack Thereof

I often get phone calls from recruiters asking me if I want to do contract testing jobs for third-party vendors. I guess I put it out there that I play games and that I have done so for over 30 years, so that stands to reason that I know my way around games and consoles enough to work on them.

Now, I know that I’m very fortunate in my current position. I’ve had internal promotions, and gained experience and opportunities that I wouldn’t otherwise have had in other contract positions. I’m also now working in a specialized area of testing that pays a little bit more than the average grunt tester wage. Continue reading →

March 20, 2016
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Cassius #3 Kickstarter is now live!

Prima (L) and Junia

Guess who’s back, back again? Some of my favorite queer lady comic characters are back! Tell your friends!

(With apologies to Eminem, but really, tell your friends.)

I’ve written about Cassius and its creative team before, and it has been a long while since Issue 2 was out, so here’s an update: the Kickstarter for Issue 3 was launched last week (very aptly on the Ides of March)! Check it out here! Continue reading →

March 18, 2016
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GeekGirlCon ’15 Panel Recap: The Disability Politics of Daredevil

With Daredevil returning for season two this week, let’s revisit our GeekGirlCon panel on the show! I attended a panel with Elsa S. Henry, a feminist scholar and disability rights activist. She also happens to be legally blind and, given that Daredevil is a show with a blind protagonist, she had several misconceptions about vision impairment to clear up.

“You can still like Daredevil, but here is a perspective you might not have had before,” Henry explained to a full room at the start of the session. She began by disproving several presumptions about what it was like to be blind. “Not all blind people use braille. So a lot of what you see isn’t accurate towards a blind person’s life,” she said, with reference to Matt Murdock’s constant use of a braille output device. “Most people use text-speak; you can hear it and don’t need to mess around with machines. When I watch the show, it’s very difficult not to notice things that don’t make any sense.” Continue reading →

August 22, 2015
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Morality and Games, and the Morality of Games

I started contributing to International Games Day @your Library, which is a non-profit, volunteer-run organization to make games inclusive in library collections. In my writing for them, I analyze some issues in games and write down my thoughts. This piece originally appeared on their blog.

One aspect of playing games is that we can do things in games that we cannot—for a variety of reasons—do in real life. We become fighters, adventurers, characters with distinct motivations and abilities to our actual selves. For example, even if we can’t fly in real life, we might be able to in a game. Or maybe we develop ninja-like fighting skills, while in real life we are horribly uncoordinated.

Notice that the examples I give about are cases where we’re limited by physical boundaries. But what about moral considerations? Just because there are games where we can kill, backstab, steal, and rape, does this mean that we should do those things? What do our moral decisions in games tell us about what kinds of people we are? Continue reading →

August 14, 2015
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Cassius is More than Just “Ass-Kicking Roman Lesbians”

I’ve read a lot of comics in my time, but I’ve never really found many that address my non-comic political interests. A possible exception has been Mike Carey and Peter Gross’ The Unwritten series, which discusses things such as metastories and political philosophy, but that’s just one instance. Exceptions are rare.

This is why I was super excited to have the opportunity to review Cassius, which on the face of it, was going to address some of my other interests: I love history, I love Shakespeare, and I love dynamic female characters. Cassius has all of these things in scads, which pleases me immensely. Continue reading →

June 16, 2015
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#WeWantWidow! Do you?

Over the weekend in downtown Seattle, you may have seen cosplayers dressed as Black Widow by the International Fountain, or you might have noticed your social media feeds were flooded with pictures of Black Widow. You might have seen that the hashtag #WeWantWidow was trending.

That’s because there was a multi-city flash mob to generate buzz and awareness of the lack of Black Widow on Avengers merchandising, as well as to show support for Black Widow to star in her own movie. Starting in Sydney, Australia at 12:00 pm local time, the “Widow Wave” spread across to Canada and the United States. In cities from Tampa to Ottawa, and from New York City to San Diego, hundreds of cosplayers dressed as Black Widow descended on the streets, while even more online supporters showed their support by changing their profile images to ones of Black Widow, and reposting images or tweeting using the hashtag #WeWantWidow.

Continue reading →

June 3, 2015
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“Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?” An interview with Maddie Messer

Maddie Messer is not your ordinary 12-year-old girl. In March this year, she published an op-ed in the Washington Post after she noticed a disparity between male and female characters in endless runner games on her iPhone.

Although Maddie says that she loves these games, she discovered that there were oftentimes male characters, but not female ones. Or, where there were female characters, they had to be unlocked, while the default character was male. This was problematic. However, there are few statistics about the representation of gender in this genre, so, she set out to prove it. Continue reading →

May 2, 2015
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Celebrating Asian-Pacific Heritage

Did you know that “ketchup” is a Chinese word? Or that the first female gunnery officer in the navy was a Korean-American in 1946? Or that the current Chief Justice of California is a Filipino-American woman? Or that a Chinese-American biologist co-invented the oral contraceptive pill and pioneered in-vitro fertilization?

Asian-Pacific Americans have long since been a part (albeit understated) of the American landscape, and May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month. It’s a time to commemorate the contributions that they have made, and to celebrate the ongoing relationship and cultural diversity that Asian-Pacific Americans provide to American society and culture.