Month: May 2015

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 03 – B-grade Games

This month’s minisode comes a few days early because the last day of the month is a Sunday and it’s going to be rather jam packed with content anyway. I would like to thank Aevee Bee for agreeing to come on the show on such short notice. It was a really good fit. See, as I have mentioned before, I haven’t a whole lot of rules on how the minisodes operate. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll implement them when problems arise. So far, the rules as they are, are the games must have little to no criticism and no repeats. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Five out of Ten or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Journey to Na Pali

This is the first double header podcast for the Critical Distance Confab in quite a while. This month I was joined by Alan Williamson to talk about two of his publishing projects. In each part, he was joined by his collaborator, Lindsey Joyce concerning Five out of Ten magazine and Kaitlin Tremblay regarding their co-authored book Escape to Na Pali: Journey to the Unreal. Both Side A and Side B as I’ve dubbed them can be found here. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Unearthing the ‘Charnel House’

This time on the Moving Pixels Podcast we talk about the recently release point-and-click adventure game, The Charnel House Trilogy. I appreciate The Charnel House Trilogy more as a formal exercise than I do as a work on its own. I have complicated feelings about it. On the one hand, I don’t feel as if everything connected together or gave me fulfilling story. Yet, on the other, it doesn’t feel like a work that is finished. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Challenge and Abstract Narrative in Adventure Games

I continue off a thread I left hanging last week by addressing adventure games need and use of challenge. Where last week I used the example of The Charnel House Trilogy as a game where easy puzzles and clear direction made of a good experience of playing the actor in a script. It challenges the dichotomy of the adventure game and the point-and-click subgenre specifically. Having my mind opened to this new lens, a way of viewing information that had already been bubbling around in my head, I looked at the other end of the scale. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

What is ‘Jazzpunk’?

This week we discussed Jazzpunk on the Moving Pixels Podcast. Jazzpunk was one of my favorite games of last year. It was a pleasure to talk about it on the podcast. Listening to the podcast again it made me appreciate how dense and how deep the game is. We talk for over an hour and we don’t manage to scrape the surface of the material. There’s plenty we didn’t get to dive into and what various elements say about the creators, video games and culture in general. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Adventure Games As Theater and ‘The Charnel House Trilogy’

My weekly PopMatters post is up on the newly redesigned site. I talk about The Charnel House Trilogy and the thing that stuck out to me the most about it. I’ve had this idea of point-and-click adventure games as a form of theater without the script given to the player ahead of time for a quite a while. The static nature of the frame of the point-and-click just makes the concept of performance to an outside observer more apparent than other game genres where the camera moves. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 2 – Interactive Fiction and Object Toys

Another month, our second minisode on the Critical Distance Confab. I really like this series. I like getting to just chat about games and this is a good outlet for trying to foster conversation. Win/win. As a result, I have been really excited for the past two weeks as I waited for the release date to finally come. The minisodes are still a work in progress. During the recording of this episode Zoya, while talking about CHYRZA, mentioned a piece I had just written about another of Kitty Horrorshow’s. | more