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New podcast is dedicated to discussing death and videogames

A new podcast called PlayDead explores the intersection of loss, death anxiety, death positivity, and game mechanics. It’s hosted by Gabby DaRienzo, who openly confesses to being obsessed with “death positivity.” And, in fact, DaRienzo wrote a piece for Kill Screen last year, titled Death Positivity in Videogames, which foreshadows the focus of this podcast in many ways. It’s a podcast that seems to be actively looking to contextualize videogames as yet another artistic medium exploring the theme of death. Even the earliest videogames such as Spacewar! (1962) are predicated on the idea that a game ends when a player dies. Often it’s the case that GAME OVER…

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Simogo announces four-part "podcast mystery," is just the coolest

“Deep breath.” /// Swedish pair Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardebäck, the two personalities that form Simogo, have proven their talent in producing air-sucking audiences. Year Walk was a creepy folk-thriller that you gasped along to. DEVICE 6 used text as a path to weave a tale of regular staccato; you took sharp inward breaths at every knife-twist and solved puzzle. Then, with The Sailor’s Dream, we rowed along a sea of lost places, caught in a meditative reverie. Here, you could breath with the rhythm of the waves, which were a reliable return location from each journey into the game’s…