Not Just A Game

In which we discuss how, when, where, and why we might quit a game. It turns out we’ve both quit a lot of games for lots of different reasons! Tyr spins this into a beautiful archaeological metaphor, and we work through our site abandonment – whether planned, drifting away or through sudden flood. We talk … Continue reading "Episode 23: Quitting"

In which Tyr, an archaeologist, discusses the Antiquarians Guild in Elder Scrolls Online with Catherine, who is not an archaeologist. Also: Baldur’s Gate 3, a crying baby, Hades, and why crunch sucks. Also also: whether you can still enjoy a thing if you disagree with the creator of said thing. James Acaster on the British … Continue reading "Episode 22: Antiquarianism"

Black Lives Matter. So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo Black Game Developers. Hire them. Buy their stuff. Never Alone. Games by Black creators: https://radmagpie.org/blog/2020/2/6/support-black-game-developers https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/02/26/games-developed-by-black-developers-you-should-look-out-for https://www.inverse.com/gaming/video-games-by-black-developers Behind the Police podcast

We’re back! No I can’t quite believe it either! Anyway, we are talking about travel in this episode. It’s very exciting. Also, I’ve had a baby (he’s now 1, and absolutely adorable), and Tyr has moved to another country! We talk about this a bit. We also talk about games that have travel in them, … Continue reading "Episode 20: Travel"

In this episode, Tyr and Catherine have opinions. No, we have Opinions. Capital O Opinions. Some of them are probably unpopular. Some of them we would defend with our lives. (Maybe.) Bad words are said. Totally @ us. (@CatherineFlick and @FothergillTyr on Twitter!) We are also going to PAX East this year! Please come visit … Continue reading "Episode 19 Capital O Opinions"

We’re back! In this episode, Tyr and Catherine play The Return of the Obra Dinn, and talk about it! Spoilers: It’s a very good game. Like our stuff? Please support us on our Patreon!

In this episode we talk holidays! Why do we have certain holidays in games, and not others? Why is Christmas in games not quite Christmas, but a weird pagan version of Christmas? Is it only because game devs want to annoy right wing American Christians? Where do all these  in-game traditions come from anyway? (It’s probably … Continue reading "Episode 17: It’s beginning to look a lot like Saturnalia!"

In this episode we talk about pets! Particularly Fortnite Pets, being both dragon experts and not Fortnite players at all. We may or may not sing silly on-topic songs. We discuss taking cute things into battle, gender issues of pets, domestic animals as food vs pets, particularly guinea pigs, and Fortnite and parenting despite not … Continue reading "Episode 16: Let’s Talk about Pets!"

In which Catherine and Tyr wrangle another fascinating victim special guest at ETHICOMP 2018, Prof. Andrew Adams, to talk about Pokémon Go and augmented reality games more generally. (Yes, another Pokémon Go one. I think we’re almost all out of material on Pokémon Go now.) We talk social norms about Pokémon Go in Japan vs. … Continue reading "Episode 15: Augmented Reality and social norms – with Andrew Adams"

Hello! In this episode I have to apologise for the sound quality; we were recording at ETHICOMP 2018 in Sopot, Poland and the room was a bit more echoey than expected (and noisier) and apparently I didn’t point the microphone in quite the right direction. The sound does get better as the episode goes on. … Continue reading "Episode 14: Twinkle Ponies – with Erica Neely on Ethics of Lootboxes"

Back to our regular schedule! In this episode, we had a loadddd of technical issues which meant that we lost a bit of discussion, sadly (my poor old laptop couldn’t cope with a browser window being open while recording. Let’s just say old laptop has now gone to the “backup machine” pile now

Grrrr arrrrrghhh! We have risen from the (summertime busy-ness) dead and feasted on brains responded to all of your questions from our PAX East panel on our video! Our plans for this podcast are growing as well – we now plan to do recordings more frequently, have actually put a standing two hour block of … Continue reading "Episode 12: PAX East 2018 BRAAAAAAAINS! Archaeology and Philosophy of Zombies in Games followup"

You may have seen our talk at PAX East on the Ethics of Pokémon Go – either live or via the YouTube video available at: https://www.notjustagame.eu/2018/05/07/video-interlude-pax-east-2018-ethics-of-pokemon-go/ In this episode we follow up with some of the questions we didn’t get to in the talk – it’s a bit longer than our usual episodes, and we’ll … Continue reading "Episode 11 – PAX East Pokémon Go followup"

Tyr and I are off to PAX East again, this time we will be talking about zombies (and Pokémon Go!)! We were so excited we  invited some special guests to come play Left 4 Dead 2 with us (yes, they are our very patient and lovely husbands, Martin and Ray). Listen in to some of … Continue reading "Episode 10 – Zombies!"