Less Human Than Human: Blade Runner and Gender

An abridged version of this article appeared in Huffington Post

I’d been excited for Blade Runner 2049 for a long time. I’m a huge fan of the original, and even if the new movie had the potential to be awful, I knew I’d go into it with my heart wide open. I’m always desperate for more cyberpunk in my life, and I’m willing to go through a lot of pain to make that happen.

But despite the fact that I was willing to overlook almost every issue for the sake of one of my favourite genres, 2049 had a fatal issue that I couldn’t get past: it spent three hours demonstrating that a number of its characters were less than human, ruining the entire movie for me.

No, not the Replicants.

The women.

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Cold Boot

This was originally published on Medium back in February, 2015

I grew up in one of the most incredible eras. The timing was really impeccable. I was born the same year the Macintosh was released. The proliferation of personal computers is something I witnessed first-hand. I remember monitors that could show only orange, followed by CGA (3 colours), EGA (16 colours), and VGA (256 colours, which was nothing short of a revelation). It was a complicated, new, and occasionally scary world.

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From Zork to Halo and Back Again

This was originally written as a guest post for the website The Fictorians

When you start a conversation about storytelling in video games, it’s hard to not immediately jump to discussions about the writing in Halo, Call of Duty, Uncharted, God of War, and the other games that have graced living rooms across the globe. There’s a lot that can be said about the stories in these games–both how they’re written and how they’re presented. Some of these games tell expertly penned and deeply engaging stories, and there are some seriously talented people behind them. People like Ragnar Tornquist, Amy Hennig, and Chris Avellone have left their prints on the entire industry.

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