Stefan H. Simond

PS5 Giveaway

We have had a wonderful start this year and this is in no small part due to you out there. We sincerely appreciate your love for Studying Pixels and thus want to give you something in return, a Christmas gift, namely: a PS5. What you get A brand new PlayStation 5 Disc Edition including one…

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Title Blunder

It’s at the tip of my tongue! Have you ever forgotten the title of a video game and instead just given it a ridiculous description? Well, that is exactly what we do for this week. Enjoy our title blunders! In our side quests, we share our initial impressions of Shin Megami Tensei V, give a dreary…

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Why are all games about time loops these days? (with Federico Alvarez Igarzábal)

What if we could start all over again? – These days, a whole bunch of games tries to answer this question. From Hades to Returnal, from Loop Hero to 12 Minutes, and most recently: Deathloop. To help us understand why there is such an abundance of time loop games, we are joined by game studies scholar Federico Alvarez Igarzábal. Shownotes 00:05:24 Why are all…

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How Yakuza works

This is one of our monthly plus episodes. You can access it by subscribing to Studying Pixels Plus. You will then receive an individual plus feed that you can add to your favourite podcast app. Nearly everyone seems to have heard of Yakuza – primarily as this quirky Japanese series that is a small yet dedicated…

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Halloween Special: Cursed Games

“I am god here.” A strangely unsettling sentence, especially if uttered by a character in a game that might very well be cursed. For this Halloween we collect and retell our favorite gaming-related creepypastas and urban legends. Shownotes 00:05:08 The Lavender Town Incident (Pokémon Red/Blue) Pokémon Lavender Town Original Score 00:13:44 BEN Drowned (The Legend…

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The Myth of Missing No.

Could that school friend really be right about this Pokémon that is not supposed to exist? Is there really a way to infinitely multiply items as this Nintendo magazine suggests? – We’re diving back into our childhood to unravel how Missing No. changed the ideas about how video games work and who owns their lore….

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Squid Game

Everyone is talking about it and so are we: the South Korean survival drama Squid Game. Its astounding popularity aside, we are especially curious about what the show tells us about games, play, and their relation to very real class disparity. (Our main story is spoiler free, so no to worry. We’ve got a separate and…

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Reading Roger Caillois: Man, Play, and Games

Many have tried (and many failed) to bring various games together in a set of comprehensive categories. Roger Caillois is one of them and we are diving into his Classification of Games to explore the categories and how they apply to contemporary video games. In our side quests, we discuss the biggest leack in the history of…

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How NOT to write a term paper

This is one of our monthly plus episodes. You can access it by subscribing to Studying Pixels Plus. You will then receive an individual plus feed that you can add to your favourite podcast app. Writing term papers can be a tough and tedious task. We wish to help by sharing with you the most common…

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The Friends We Make

Friendships are so precious. Video games never get tired of emphasizing that. Aside from reminiscing about the friends we made with fictional characters, we also discuss the absurd albeit necessary tendency to quantify friendships. In our side quests, we discuss the recent settlement of one of the lawsuits against Activision Blizzard and catch up with announcements in…

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