Our series on play continues with a very special episode, requested by our own Kaarina Mikalson. Clare Mulcahy is a scholar and a gentleman, but in her free time she likes to play video games, and more importantly she likes to talk to her friends about them. Lucky you, you’re all her friends now, so enjoy listening in.
- Let’s start off with some facts about video game playing. This article is a few years old, but it lays out some important statistics, including just how many women are long-term gamers.
- Speaking of misogyny in gaming, here’s an article about that time a game randomly assigned players’ avatars a gender, and men were not impressed.
- We talk about games as a helpful treatment for anxiety, and this article agrees: “For anyone who’s ever experienced anxiety, where every day tasks seem insurmountable and the only reward at the end of the path is another day living with your mental health issue, a fantasy world where plotlines are resolved is a pretty easy sell.”
- Are you sold? Ready for some recommendations? We talk about Stardew Valley, Night in the Woods, You Must Build a Boat, Broken Age, and Kingdom Rush: Frontiers. This is a great time to get into Stardew Valley, with the new multiplayer game on its way. Oh, and for any of you who arrived at this podcast by way of Witch, Please, you should know that the makers of Stardew Valley have a NEW MAGIC SCHOOL RPG coming soon!
- Finally, if you would like to dive into the deep weirdness that is Monster Factory, we recommend beginning with the Final Pam.
Download Episode / Read Transcription
The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Clare’s theme song is the Hyrule Field Theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Secret Feminist Agenda 
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One of my favorites for sure 🙂
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I would like to recommend Hanako Games. I like a lot of their games, but specifically, Magical Diary. It’s a visual novel about a young woman who finds out that she’s ‘wildseed’; born with magic, and she has to go to a magical university. With houses.
Most of the plots are quite gentle plots about the students’ lives, but you also get to try to use your spells to get out of dungeons to pass your school exams. There are classes where you learn abut gender neutral pronouns. You can choose different body types and skin colours. And the romance options are so good: not only does it include people of colour, and women as well as men, it also includes a potential asexual romance. Best of all, if you go for the ‘bad boy’ who pushes your boundaries… he does you huge amounts of harm, because that whole trope is really toxic.
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I love the Lego video games. There’s story and some challenges but it’s mostly simple. Depending on the game there are open world spaces with quests as well as stories to follow which are often familiar stories like the Harry Potter or Star Wars movies. In the newest DC Lego game you create a non gendered super hero character and you earn different costume pieces so you can look however you wish. This was the first game I have played where the first question when creating a character was not m/f?
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