Pyre, Purgatories, Prison Dramas, and Talking Dogs, with Greg Kasavin

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO Podcast, Episode 31.

http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/etao.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/etao-podcast-31.mp3

Greg Kasavin stops by to discuss Supergiant’s latest, the party-based purgatory-escape-’em-up Pyre. We also find some time to discuss Bastion and Transistor, not to mention the limits of “naked allegory,” the largely untapped potential of diegetic Game Over states—and more generally, of game designs that allow for and accommodate failure—and the ballsy magic of filling a game with material that most players will never see.

Ah, and of course, Greg does mention and the unique mixture of terror and pride that comes with releasing a game into the swirling masterpiece-maelstrom that is 2017. Quite a year for games, this year of ours.

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• Here’s my 2011 interview with Greg, which is almost entirely about the Shrines and the (then very novel!) “reactive narrator” in Bastion.

• And here’s the Giant Bomb interview that I refer to a few times.

• In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “The slave is submissive when one has succeeded in mystifying him in such a way that his situation does not seem to him to be imposed by men, but to be immediately given by nature, by the gods, by the powers against whom revolt has no meaning; thus, he does not accept his condition through a resignation of his freedom since he can not even dream of any other; and in his relationships with his friends, for example, he can live as a free and moral man within this world where his ignorance has enclosed him.”
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“All The People Say (Season 2)” by Carpe Demon.
“Within the Prison of My Dreams” by Jessie Crawford.
“Purgatory” by Jenny-Lou Carson, performed by the Deep River Boys.

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