Month: August 2015

Eric Swain External Sources

Coming of Age When ‘Life is Strange’

And so begins another series of podcasts, episode by episode, of another episodic adventure game. This time it is Dontnod’s Life is Strange. I’ve been hoping at some point we’d get to talk about Life is Strange. Ever since I first played it back in January. Though I was a little down on it at first, the game offered a lot of material worthy of discussion. It’s a dense game with multiple lens that can be applied to it. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Searching For ‘Her Story’

This time we talked about this year’s water cooler game, Her Story. This is up a bit late as we had a number of technical difficulties. First a broken computer meant it wasn’t posted on its normal Monday date. Then an issue with SoundCloud meant the podcast couldn’t be downloaded until last night. It’s all fixed now. This is a game I knew we’d have a good discussion about, even if I didn’t have my own opinion on it straight. In fact, I’m still not sure what I think of it overall, because it is a complex work. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Attempting to Characterize Artificial Intelligence in ‘The Fall’

I’m finally back to writing and finally getting around to jotting some thoughts down on my number 2 game from last year, The Fall. These are more the beginning of thoughts regarding The Fall‘s display of consciousness and intelligence than fully formed conclusions. One of the big issues a lot of science fiction has is that when it presents alien intelligence it generally just shows off a facet of human intelligence. Star Trek is the big example. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisodes 05 – Text Games, Far Away Places

Another minisode, this time I managed to rope my boss, senior curator Kris Ligman, into joining me last month. I’m getting a feel to how I want these minisodes to work. I think Aevee Bee was on the right path with giving an idea of what we would like to read about these games. I wish I had grasped onto this harder during this episode. It might have been a better idea instead of trying to explain Unrest on my own terms in a short amount of time. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Fall’ Explores Artificial Intelligence and Indentity

This time on PopMatters’ Moving Pixels Podcast we talk about my second favorite game from last year, The Fall. We continue this week with another philosophically loaded sci-fi game touching on the concept of identity. Originally, we thought about discussing both The Fall and The Swapper in the same podcast, but after recording both episodes, I’m glad we decided to separate them. They’re both such thematically dense games and we didn’t get to touch on everything I think we could have in them, that cutting the time we spent on each wouldn’t be fair to either game. | more