Moving Pixels Podcast

Hitler served as the final boss in World War II and also in Castle Wolfenstein, which is weird, right?

This week we consider a number of real life bad guys from the Nazis to the Mafia and the potential consequences of attempting to simulate such real life villainy in video games.

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.