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Eric Swain External Sources

Even More Mines, Maps and Madness

In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: so, begins this episode of the Moving Pixels podcast on Kentucky Route Zero Act 3. Ever since this episode was recorded back in May (good lord, are we ahead of the curve) I’ve been anticipating this podcast’s release. I really like this game and that definitely comes across in our discussion, but after recording it I felt like we had managed to do better than our usual fare, if I may be a braggart for a moment. | more

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Values and the Meaning of Moral Behavior in Video Games

The unintended trilogy about morality in video games became an unintended quadrilogy, this time looking not at choice, but at behavior. Given my narrow focus in looking at this subject, I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but this is not about whether the actions available in a game are moral or good or whatever. This is about games that give choices based on morals and how they reflect or more often fail to reflect in those video games. | more

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A Brief History of Infamy

Wey hey and up she rises, wey hey and up she rises, wey hey and up she rises early in the morning. Coming about 8 months after the game was release, we publish our podcast on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I haven’t talked about a game this large in scope on the podcast in a long time. Trying to encompass everything about the game in a mere hour and half is a foolhardy attempt. As such we only touch on the greatest hits. | more

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Choice and Consequence in ‘Papers, Please’

And with this PopMatters post I finish up an unexpected trilogy about morality in video games. The original post about The Wolf Among Us was supposed to be a one off and then I would go and tackle ideas about other games that had been building up during my inadvertent time off. But then I got those comments that ignored the main thrust of what I was trying to say by highlighting a single choice from that game and so I expanded. That happened with this post as well. It’s is just a hair under 3000 words. | more

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Critical Distance Confab – The Blogfather

Two years ago, I did a handful of interviews with critics that laid much of the foundation of what we consider modern independent video game criticism. They were intended to be the next few episode of the Critical Distance Confab. For various reasons they got back burned (mostly because I couldn’t stand listening to my own voice in editing) and we weren’t going to use them. Since then, I’ve moved my position to pure background technical monkey regarding the podcast. It’s for the best. | more

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More Thoughts on a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games

I felt I needed to pick up on a thread regarding video game morality and clarify some things from last week’s PopMatters column. For some reason when I was expressing my love for the complexity in a moral choice in The Wolf Among Us against the normal bland good/evil dichotomy, it was confused for me saying that it was great that that one dichotomy was replace with a law/chaos dichotomy and that was somehow commendable. Especially when I said that this particular choice went against the grain of how we think of law vs. | more

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The Fairy Tale of the Economic Downturn

We continue our podcast discussions of The Wolf Among Us with episode 3: A Crooked Mile. We felt that this episode really picked up the pace as the story finally came into its own. The themes seem more palpaple than ever and we get to talking more on the nature of the choices in The Wolf Among Us. Plus, I get to drop a few tidbits on some of the small craftsmanship stuff that is done. We talk about a lot of different subjects in this episode and yet the podcast itself is much shorter than our usual fare as of late. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Towards a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games: ‘The Wolf Among Us’

And I’m back in my Tuesday slot with my PopMatters column, looking a little in depth on a single choice from The Wolf Among Us. On the podcast all three of us have been a little down on the choices in The Wolf Among Us as they don’t feel as debatable or as in depth as we would like. I’ve heard this sentiment echoed elsewhere on the internet. And for the most part it does seem that The Wolf Among Us isn’t providing the same if not quality then style of choice we quickly became accustomed to in The Walking Dead. | more

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The Size and Wisdom of ‘Myst’

For this week’s PopMatter’s column I look back 21 years to the original CD-ROM game: Myst. The opening sentence of that piece was the main thought running through my head during my recent playthrough of the 1993 adventure game. “Myst is a lot smaller than I remember.” I realize that time takes a toll on memory and we look back on things with rose tinted glasses. But it wasn’t a difference in the measure of quality I was taken aback by, but the size of the game world. | more

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The Agony and the Allure of the Side Quest

Maybe a poor week to release a podcast with so much attention elsewhere in the gaming scene, but we have a schedule. This week we aren’t talking about a video game, but a part of video games – the side quest. We start talking about what they are useful for and what they do in games, but once it gets to me, I changed the conversation to something more fundamental. I didn’t know how to answer Chris’ question because I wasn’t sure how to define what a side quest was in the first place. | more