Podcast Episode #4: The One About Video Game Villains

There are no monsters in this story, only men. Also, monsters. The fourth episode of Bleeping Sickness is about our favourite video game villains and what exactly makes a good bad guy! Is that a contradiction in terms? Meh. Full show notes below the jump!

Guest feature: Why Gone Home would make a really boring film

In our first guest feature, Jess talks about why Gone Home and other story-heavy games like it prove that there are experiences only games can create.

“Game feel” is a term I learnt not long ago but have become attached to when talking about my favourite games. It’s generally used as a term to mean the physical feeling you get when playing a video game. As Brendon Keogh explains in his reader on game feel: “the reason we really play a videogame is because it feels real good within our soft meaty body. Video games are a carnal pleasure”. This physical manifestation of the intangible world of a video game is important to our experience of the stories within them. The medium gives us an extra layer of bodily experience inside of the base textual aspects of any narrative. This marriage of a bodily experience and traditional storytelling is what makes video games a very effective avenue for rich and layered stories to be told in interesting and new ways.