Moving Pixels Podcast

Death happens in games. A lot.   Well, or at least it used to. This episode of the Moving Pixels Podcast considers the changing face of death in video games as well as what kinds of roles death serves in games.   Is death about punishment, pleasure, pedagogy, or is it merely an immersion breaking illusion? We play around with a number of possibilities.

This week's podcast contributors, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, discuss some recent indie releases. Our review includes Thomas Brush's Coma, Alexander Ocias's Loved, and Digipen's Solace.   This series of games seem built more to engage and immerse than many similar titles of the Triple A variety. We discuss the virtues and vices of using games as a means to evoke emotion and whether they remain "games" in the familiar sense of the word at all.

Most gamers today probably don't remember that for a while in the 1980s the best-selling, most critically acclaimed computer games didn't have any graphics at all. They were text adventures and were some of the most innovative and challenging forms of entertainment ever conceived. Historian and documentary filmmaker Jason Scott has spent the last four years interviewing the men and women who created these games. The result is Get Lamp, a fascinating documentary about the history of these games-from the original Adventure, through the rise and fall of Infocom, and up to today's interactive fiction scene.   Jason Scott is the curator of TextFiles.com and is also the man behind BBS: The Documentary, a look at the computer bulletin board systems that pre-date mass usage of the internet. He's a regular speaker at hacker and technology conferences and his cat has well over a million followers on Twitter. Really.

Following up last week's podcast on "Femininity and the Female Body in Video Games", this week we decided to discuss masculinity and the male body in games.   This week's contributors include G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, Thomas Cross, and our guest from last week, Kris Ligman. We discuss a variety of male characters, their body types and personas, and how they relay messages about masculinity to players. In addition to traditional heterosexual constructions of male bodies, we also consider some of the presentations of homosexuality and the masculine.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast is a couple men down, but blogger Kris Ligman fills in as our guest for a discussion of femininity and the female body in video games.   The female body has been historically exaggerated in video games and questions arise about whether femininity is authentically represented at all in characters that very often appear to be reskinned versions of men. We consider why this might be, what sorts of characters might be more positive representations of women, and what messages female representations send to players of video games.   Join us next week when we turn the discussion around and consider masculinity and the male body in video games.

Like last week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew is focusing on a broader topic in gaming for the week, co-operative gameplay.   Our regular contributors, G. Christopher Williams, Nick Dinicola, and Thomas Cross, discuss varying kinds of co-op style play from the living room to the arcade to multiplayer online and the kinds of dynamics that these experiences create among players.   Rick Dakan is on a short hiatus from the podacst, but he should be back with us in a few weeks. In the meantime, I am sitting in as host this week. So, be gentle, it's my first time.

We have been focusing on discussions of individual games for a number of weeks. This week we decided to consider some broader interests in games once again. In this case, we decided to talk about how character customization effects our experience of a game world.   As a result, our discussion considers how initial character creation as well as ways of modifying characters, like buying clothing in a game world, affects our sense of the characters that we inhabit when we play games.   Oh, we also wonder a bit about why we like to play as girls.   We will be focusing on a number of these broader topics in the next few weeks and should also be including a few guests from the PopMatters staff. So, be sure to tune us in in the coming weeks.

Well, if you have been following the Multimedia section of the site for the past few weeks (and if you haven't there are links below), you know that quite a few of our regular contributors have had a lot to say about Playdead's Limbo (and we aren't alone on the Internet). Having had our chance to have our say individually, the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to hash out our thinking about the game collectively.    The resulting discussion considers the significance of the game from an artistic perspective, what we feel it gets right and gets wrong, and generally gets lost in the shadows and ambiguities of the game's haunting, little world.

Following up on our podcast from last month on "The World of Max Payne", our regular podcast contributors take a look at the less successful but critically acclaimed sequel to the 2001 game, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, and consider the evolution of Remedy Entertainment's approach to world building (culminating in their most recent release, Alan Wake).   We also discuss the evolution of the character Max Payne and the gameplay mechanisms that surround him. We also consider how a playable Mona Sax changes our sense of the series and whether Max (and the player) legitimately falls for her.

This week we have a special interview for you. We'll be doing more interviews as time goes on, talking with people who're not just gamers, but people who've been genuinely moved by their love of games.   Holly Conrad is a costume designer and an avid gamer. And by costume designer, I mean sculptor, engineer, seamstress, and designer. She recently became a minor internet celebrity with her audition video for a Joss Whedon produced documentary about Comic Con, in which she showed off the impressive set of Mass Effect 2 costumes that she's been creating.   She took time from her busy schedule to talk about games and how they inspire.   Warning: There are some spoilers for Mass Effect 2 in theis discussion.

Coming off a really solid half year of gaming and in the wake of E3, the Moving Pixels podcast considers the upcoming titles that publishers and developers have just given us a taste for. Based on screenshots, teasers, and gameplay demos we discuss titles that look exciting, disappointing, and just plain intimidating (I'm looking at you Portal 2 gameplay demo).   Playing the role of prophet is a tradition as old as video game criticism, so look no further for a heap of prognostication and plain ol' guesswork.

Turn around, walk away, blow town. That would have been the smart thing to do. Guess I wasn't that smart.-Max Payne   I guess the Moving Pixels crew isn't that smart either. Rather than bask in the warmth of the summer sun, our podcast crew revisits the darkened, snowed-in streets of Noir York City with a discussion of Max Payne.   Arriving in 2001 with stylish bullet time gunplay and an attitude boiled harder than any novel by Dashiell Hammett, Max Payne remains a significant influence on this decade's games. We consider why and whether it holds up nearly a decade after its release.

Last week Nick, Tom, and Rick discussed the world and game play of Red Dead Redemption in a spoiler-free episode.   This week, Chris is back with the posse, and we delve into the storytelling and overall plot of Red Dead Redemption. We look at the motives of John Marston, as well as those of the cavalcade of characters that make up Rockstar's western. Spoilers abound, so consider yourself warned.

This week we're a man down, but there's no stopping us now that we're hot on the trail. Nick, Tom, and Rick take on the world and game play of Red Dead Redemption in this spoiler-free episode. Does this Grand Theft Auto-influenced open world Old West extravaganza live up to its gaming pedigree? Or does it maybe exceed all expectations? Or does it depend on who you ask? As always, we don't all quite agree, but we've all got a lot to say about the world of Red Dead Redemption.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast explores the American Nightmare that is the Capital Wasteland. We consider how Bethesda merges a retro American ideal with their post-apocalyptic vision of an America "after the bomb" in Fallout 3.   From the birth of the player character into this American wilderness to the role of the first person perspective in seeing this new world, our regular podcast contributors analyze the quirks and curiosities of this kind of game world.

The town of Bright Falls is a pretty creepy place made creepier by the imagination of author, Alan Wake, but also by the player's own fears.   This week we discuss how effectively terror and fear are generated in the game Alan Wake and how the player is complicit in authoring such horror as well.

The worlds of the Assassin's Creed series are layered ones. Simulations of historical times and places are nested within a near future world of corporate intrigue and a broader vision of history defined by an ages old battle between templars and assassins.   Our podcast contributors spent this week unravelling these worlds within worlds as well as exploring their interelatedness. Join the Moving Pixels podcast for a discussion of simulations within simulations, historical recreations, and the presentation of worlds both familiar, mysterious, and most often brutally realized.

After last week's look at the vast reaches of outer space, we decided to change the focus of our discussion from the heavens to the depths of the ocean. Arguably one of the most fully realized spaces in contemporary gaming, Rapture is almost less a city than it is a mood, a tone, an atmosphere.   Our crew discusses our responses to the latest iteration of the terrifying but often sublime undersea city as it appears in Bioshock 2.

This week our discussion of game worlds moves from the claustrophobic halls of the asylum to the vast reaches of space.   Continuing our consideration of game worlds and their effect on our experience playing games, we consider both the broad galatic maps of Mass Effect as well as the narrower confines of intergalatic ports of call and the bridges of starships and how they impact on Bioware's collection of characters.

First things first, a number of readers have been requesting that the Moving Pixels podcast be made available via iTunes. Your wish has been granted, and you can now access the podcast through Apple's site. Please check us out there and any previous episodes that you may have missed.   This week we are changing gears. Following our six-part series on storytelling, we have decided to shift our focus to game worlds and how they contribute to our experience in gaming.   First up, this week is a discussion of a game that garnered a lot of buzz for its sharply drawn vision of madness and mayhem, Batman: Arkham Asylum.