Tag: Podcast

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

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

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

Eric Swain External Sources

The Ghost of ‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’

This time on the Moving Pixels Podcast we are looking at last year’s AAA 3D adventure game, Murdered: Soul Suspect. I think we had a pretty good discussion on the game. We cover a lot of ground, mostly non plot related, if you’re worried about us spoiling the mystery. Instead, we spent our time focused on the context surrounding the main plot. We look at the tone, the genre mash up, the investigative design, the quality of the writing, character functions and a nice sized chunk of a discussion at the end of the asylum, one really problematic element I didn’t notice the framing of the first time through. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – The History of Everyday Games

This month I was joined on the Critical Distance Confab by Zoya Street. For those of you who might not know, he is the author of both Dreamcast Worlds and Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics as well as the editor-in-chief of the free e-zine Memory Insufficient. Interesting thing I noticed while editing this month’s interview: every single person I’ve interviewed so far has, at some point, apologized for rambling. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Cat Lady’ and the Terror of Loneliness

This time we podcasted about The Cat Lady, an indie adventure game from 2012 about suicide, death and living. This is not a game that gets a whole lot of talk about it. It not hard to see why. It came out during a year exploding with great indies of … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Moving Pixels Podcast: 'The Cat Lady' and the Terror of Loneliness » PopMatters "While I'm gone, think of a vegetable." | more

Eric Swain External Sources

A New Critical Distance Confab Undertaking

Everyone has had that thought, “why has no one written about this game?” It’s a different game(s) for every person, but pretty much everyone has had that thought. Sometimes, after finishing a game I go looking for criticism, only to come up empty. An idea came to me during last year’s end of year podcast. While as a curatorial site we mostly focus on criticism for our weekly roundups, but we have been branching out as of late. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Revisiting The Great War

We continue our look at last year’s indie games with Ubisoft’s Valiant Hearts. I really like this discussion. I come out very coherent and make a lot of good points. Everyone does. We talk about the war and war in general as exemplified as a thing unto itself. We discuss the concept of identity from the nationalistic to the individualistic. We talk about the end of rationality and larger cultural forces that Valiant Hearts is playing with given its subject matter. | more