Year: 2015

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Sometimes It’s Hard to Discover That ‘Life is Strange’

We continue our series on the episodic adventure game Life is Strange, with episode 2. This episode of the podcast does deserve a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault, rape and suicide. Not necessarily connected or in that order. The discussion got a bit heated in the middle over one of the choices in the game and the implications several of us felt that they reflected in the real world. | more

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How Artificial Intelligence Views Humans in ‘The Fall’

In my last PopMatters post I wrote about how humans view AI, this time I reverse the position and explore how AI views us in The Fall. I had some idea about where I was going with this as I was writing it. In fact, it would have gone up two weeks earlier, but I had to rewrite a majority of it so that many of the new insights that I gleened during the process of logically thinking through each character would fit into a more nuanced and detailed thesis that had emerged. | more

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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

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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

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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

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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

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‘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

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Exploring the Nature of the Self in ‘The Swapper’

This week we discussed The Swapper, a game I put off playing for far too long. Upon relistening to our discussion, I was glad we did connect much of it back to the game as possible. I remember our discussion of the philosophy of the self and epistemology taking up the majority of the discussion. Which is fine, because if a game can engender such a discussion that’s a mark in its favor. It’s also games like The Swapper that show having a wider reference point is not just a plus, but a necessity. | more