The Mappers are joined in this January episode by one of the few games writers they’re genuinely intimidated by, and they go on a heady adventure into lands untold. How does anyone understand the landscape of a culture whose history keeps disappearing? What does it mean to want to work in a field and criticize works when every aspect of that production is increasingly devalued in both money and regard? What does it mean to explore the murky issues of consent in games? And how long can you exist on a ghostly train ride before it becomes a lens through which you view your own predispositions? All these questions and more are yours inside when Em and Jackson try their best to keep up with Lana Polansky in this heady, intense, appropriately metaphorical train wreck of an episode. Please enjoy!

You can get our podcast on iTunes, on Stitcher, or you can download it directly by clicking here.

Our guest this month is Lana Polansky, who you can find at Sufficiently Human and on Patreonand Twitter.

This Month’s Game Club Game: offɭine

Next Month’s Game Club Game: Yakuza 3

Music In This Episode

Blown Away by Kevin McLeod
the soundscape of offɭine by NAWKSH
Snowflakes by Shoji Meguro

Things (All Of Them, Until We Can’t Link Anymore) Discussed in This Episode

Arcade Review
Five out of Ten
ZEAL
Cahiers du cinéma
Critical Distance
Good Games Writing
@OldGamesWriting
Zoya Street
Reading EGM
Celia Pearce
Tracy Fullerton
Jacquelyn Ford Morie
A Game of One’s Own
Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Hélène Cixous
Simone de Beauvoir
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Virginia Woolf
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
Leigh Alexander
“You Can Sleep Here All Night”: Video Games and Labor by Ian Williams
Forska
TJ Thomas
Austin C Howe
Espen Aarseth
Roland Barthes
Susan Sontag
Gita Jackson
Mike Joffe (Check out our prior episode featuring an interview with Mike!)
Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal
Videogames of the Oppressed by Gonzalo Frasca
The Crew Review: Postcard America by Austin Walker
Level 99 Capitalist by Stephen Beirne
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
80 Days
Justice Points podcast
.error404
Bayonetta and .error404: Two Concepts of Nudity by Katherine Cross
Consensual Torture Simulator by Merritt Kopas
Hurt Me Plenty by Robert Yang
Flushed: A Toilet Gaming E-Zine
Pol Clarissou
Myst
Zork
Twine
Las Meninas, Diego Velazquez
Glitchhikers
night tune
Stars
Even The Stars
Andi Mcclure
2:22AM
Beeswing
Actual Sunlight (and Jackson’s old writing on that game)
There Are Monsters Under Your Bed
Everyone’s Hot For Worf (Lana’s upcoming parody game)