Ariana DiValentino, Author at Fanbyte

Ariana DiValentino May 12, 2020. 4 minute read

How The Sims Has Been Quietly Queering Suburbia for Two Decades

When the original Sims game came out in 2000, gay jokes were still funny to me – I was six, and the fact that Sims could WooHoo was inherently funny to me, too. But my juvenile sense of humor was undoubtedly shaped by the media landscape in which I was…

Ariana DiValentino Jan 22, 2020. 6 minute read

‘Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem’ Carries On the Detective’s Digital Legacy

Of all the famous feuds in the world, one we don’t talk about enough is detectives vs. ghosts. Or lawmen vs. witches, a better-publicized rivalry that also falls under the general category of the reasonable, the empirical, the judicial, going up against the unruly, unlikely, supernatural. In the case of…

Ariana DiValentino Aug 15, 2019. 4 minute read

In Praise of Detective Barbie: Vacation Mystery

Twenty years ago, Detective Barbie: Vacation Mystery was released, and the world of video games changed forever. Okay, that’s probably not even remotely true. But my own fate as a would-be girl gamer was sealed. As a five-year-old with a chunky beige Windows 98 machine and no siblings, Detective Barbie…