Moving Pixels Podcast

This week the podcast crew got together with writers from The Border House, Gay Gamer, and The Vorpal Bunny Ranch to discuss inclusivity in video games and these sites that provide a voice for gamers that exist on the margins.

With Chris recovering from a tonsillectomy, Kris graciously filled in to host our discussion with Alexandra Raymond of The Border House, faePuck of GayGamer.net, and Denis Farr who has worked at both sites and also writes at his own blog, Vorpal Bunny Ranch.

From campy exploitation to the exploitation of addiction, the Moving Pixels podcast discusses a few of this year's flash game releases.

You can find free-to-play versions of the three titles that we discuss in this episode below:

High Tea

Of course, we here at the Moving Pixels blog are fans of the work done over at the Critical Distance web site, a site interested in serving in a curatorial role in highlighting and maintaining various discussions in video game criticism. Conceived by Ben Abraham and launched in 2009, Critical Distance provides a weekly update of some of the best video game criticism published around the internet. Additionally, they provide a number of critical compilations of writings done by various critics, journalists, and academics on significant game titles.

We wanted to sit down and talk with Ben and fellow Critical Distance contributor, Eric Swain, to talk a little bit about the site, what purpose they see it serving in the emerging conversation about games, and how they manage the Herculean task of locating and managing such a vast array of voices.

A few weeks ago the Moving Pixels podcast crew revisited 2007's Portal in anticipation of the impending release of its sequel.

Well, the sequel has arrived, so we have gotten together once again to consider how well the follow up works in terms of its extended narrative and its various gameplay tweaks.

Given how much Dragon Age II occupied our thoughts on so many of our blogs in March, it seems inevitable that the Moving Pixels podcast crew would gather to discuss our varying takes on the game.

Despite its more limited geographical scope, Kirkwall is a game world well suited to an expanded discusssion. Bioware's ambitious efforts to tweak combat, experiment with narrative, and present one of the most inclusive casts in gaming are just a number of topics worth returning to in our expansive chat about the game.

Sometimes a tech problem requires a little strategy to resolve. With some trouble with a microphone among a few other snafus leaving us potentially unable to discuss our planned topic this week, gamers that we are, our solution was to turn this weeks show into a game by putting a little social media to work for us and treating this podcast as something a little more interactive than usual.

The result is this week's experiment in podcasting, a show based on utter miscellany about gaming and gaming culture. We sent a "voiceless" Kris Ligman out to Twitter to gather possible mini-topics for discussion this week related to gaming, and then, of course, arbitrarily assigned points to our podcasters ability for improvisationally riffing on said topics in short conversational bursts.

You will find that some of our intial efforts to shoot from the hip on topics like Lesbian Spider-Women from Mars or "books on video games" may not be all that exceptional, but as the podcast moves along and we bite into some other topics like "rewards in video games" and "spectacle in video games," I think that we gain some conversational momentum and that things get a bit more interesting.

Hopefully, you're willing to bear with us as we experiment a bit with the form. We still don't know if this is a format that we will ever play with again. We'll just have to see how response to the cast goes.

Many thanks though to those who submitted topics to Kris for the sake of this experiment (and apologies to those whose topics we just made a hash out of).

It was a shooter that was nothing like a shooter. Given the imminent release of its sequel, the Moving Pixels podcast crew felt that it was time to take a step back into 2007's Portal.

We tried to spare ourselves from just revisiting the old "cake is a lie" memes and the like and instead found ourselves revisting the tight pacing, innovative gameplay, and, oh yeah, we talk about the rivalry between GLaDOS and Chell.

At Tom's suggestion, the Moving Pixels podcast crew decided to take a trip back in time to have a look at Jordan Mechner's 1997 game, The Last Express.

A thriller/mystery packaged within the structure of a kind of much more interactive Choose Your Own Adventure, this point-and-click adventure is really not exactly like any of the genre categories that I just listed. Featuring a very different approach to the concept of a video game script and some interesting ways of playing with time, The Last Express is quite unique, offering a very mature and very innovative approach to interactive storytelling worth mulling over even a decade later.

Dungeons & Dragons might be its low tech form, but video games have not strayed far from the formula of getting some friends together, killing some monsters, and collecting loot. From Gauntlet to Diablo to Torchlight, the hack and slash game is an experience both social and individualistic, steeped ironically in both greed and co-operation.

This week the Moving Pixels podcast looks at the evolution of the dungeon crawl from its social aspects and etiquette to its mechanics and playstyle.

An aborted effort to play retro classic Maniac Mansion leads to a discussion by the Moving Pixels crew about differences between older and newer games.

We wonder how well retro games hold up with rapidly changing platform generations, as well as higher expectations for graphics quality and overall accessibility.