Spelunky: Death and Destiny

Ghosts, shotguns, caverns full of deadly traps, teleportation: the list of similarities between Destiny and Spelunky is amazing!  I wonder of anyone has done a Destiny speed run yet?

Living Folklore in Year Walk

The Night Raven from Year Walk

My latest PopMatters article is live, and it's about the realization of folklore in Year Walk.

I make an important division in this piece between games about folklore and folklore games. As I see it, the difference is one of immersion and respect. For those living embedded in cultural experiences (ie all of us), mythological narratives are fundamental aspects of reality. The man who lights candles an altar dedicated to deceased relatives, or the woman who puts slices of melon under her son's bed to ward off spirits, these processes are as mundane, in a way, as cleaning the dishes or going to sleep.

As an atheist (or agnostic at best), and a firm believer in the power of rational thought and the scientific method, I also cringe a bit at the superstitions that drive us. I find myself both awed by ritual and cautious of it. I don't always know where I stand on the practice, but I am certain of my beliefs regarding how we tell stories about these practices. It is an accuracy, if not a lie, to treat mythology like some alien artifact, some inhuman relic to be boxed up and displayed. It is far more powerful and authentic to express folklore as it is lived, as an experienced truth, mystery and legend infused with as much reality as the soil under our feet.

Year Walk is not a documentary experience by any means, but in its melding of mythos with all aspects of the game, it treats the folklore like truth.

EXP Podcast #293: The Walking Dead, Season 2 Episode 5 Debrief

Babysitting has never been so stressful.

It’s been a long and deadly road, but we’ve finally made it to the finale of The Walking Dead, Season 2. It’s the culmination of all the big questions: How does Clem adapt to increasingly adult responsibilities? How do you know when to stick with the group and when to strike out alone? Is alcohol the solution to dealing with the zombie apocalypse? We wouldn’t blame you if you needed a stiff drink after this one and we’re looking forward to hearing your responses in the comments!

- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes
- Find the show on Stitcher
- Here's the show's stand-alone feed
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking here. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.
- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show Notes:

- Runtime: 1 hr 3 mins 52 secs

- Music by Brad Sucks

Trine 2: Now You're Dying with Portals

We venture back into the magical world of Trine 2. They say any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which means the portals we discovered in this week's installments could very well have been provided by our friends at Aperture Science. Wait a second, have those boxes Amadeus conjures up always had those weird heart logos on them...?

'Pikmin 3's' Bleak Moral Landscape

Image from PopMatters

This week on PopMatters, I try to ruin everyone's fun by pointing out that Pikmin 3 can be read as an exploitative colonial metaphor.

To be fair, after a rocky start (I still want my C-stick swarm control), I ended up enjoying the game quite a bit.  The inclusion of a third controllable character and the combination of Wii Remote pointing and Wii U Gamepad map control made it perhaps the most complex yet satisfying game I've played on the system.  You need a lot of hardware, but once you set it up you have a truly unique RTS experience that makes use of the second screen in a meaningful way.  Sending your troops to way points while actively controlling other squads was good mental workout, but it never got to the point of becoming busywork.

It was actually the concept of having "troops" that stuck out to me.  This has always been a latent theme in the Pikmin series, but the daily log entries and overall backstory really stuck out to me.  The game sets up a story in which a race of beings who have doomed themselves strike out into space in search of a quick fix.  They find this fix, but in the process of doing so essentially create a laboring warrior subclass of indigenous creatures.

Jorge and I have both talked about how the procedural rhetoric, the message conveyed by a game's systems, is often more powerful than the explicit authored story.  Pikmin 3 is a prime example of this.  The game keeps track of the number of Pikmin you've created and the number of Pikmin that have died in your service, but these numbers have no value beyond the utility of having enough Pikmin to complete a job.  There is no mechanical penalty or moral judgement for sacrificing these beings.  Success is only measured by how much raw material is sent back to the mother country.

This cold calculus makes for a satisfying, if slightly horrendous, experience.

EXP Podcast #292: eSports Extravaganza

The football season is back, but the eSports League of Legends season is almost coming to a close. Now I can go from sitting in a room watching strangers play a video game to sitting in a room watching strangers play a sports ball game. How different, really, are the two experiences? And what will eSports look like when we consider it a "past time"? All this and more on this week's EXP Podcast!

- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes
- Find the show on Stitcher
- Here's the show's stand-alone feed
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking here. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.
- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show Notes:
- Runtime: 44 mins 33 secs

- Music by Brad Sucks

Spelunky: Sloth and Speed Runs

It's time once again for Spelunky! This time, featuring sloths and speed runs. Check it out below and, you know, do that whole sharing/liking thing you crazy kids are doing this year.