This month, we’re going to be talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with Ariel leading the discussion. From Ariel:
This month’s symposium is on how the latest Animal Crossing has pulled in aspects from mobile gaming, including monthly events, daily rewards, and incorporating a literal smartphone as part of the interface.
As usual, we’ll talk over Discord: 8:30 EDT, 7:30 CDT, 5:30 PDT.
Minecraft this Thursday! 8:30pm EDT, 5:30pm PDT.
This month, Pat is leading a discussion on the mod Final Fantasy 4: Free Enterprise. Quoting Pat:
When RPG designers first began to work in the digital medium, it quickly became clear that a truly faithful translation of the tabletop experience was impossible. As such, those designers developed new artistic strategies for making digital RPGs possible at all. Roguelikes and JRPGs were two very different sub-genres representing two very different artistic decisions. And yet, in FF4:Free Enterprise Edition, we are faced with a game that tries to recombine these distantly related sub-genres into one experience. We will focus on how this is possible, and which parts of each experience are able to survive hybridization.
Talk to you Thursday, 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT!
Minecraft this Thursday! 8:30pm EDT, 5:30pm PDT.
I’m fascinated by the co-op LCG genre, so I’ll want to talk about how its mix of deck-building, narrative, and co-op mechanics create its particular style of immersion. When we dabbled in the digital version of Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, we talked a little about how the element these games seem to share of participation in a developing storyworld (notably Tokien’s mythos and the Marvel universe, in addition to Lovecraft’s legendarium) might go hand-in-hand with the same kind of power-fantasy we tend to bemoan in mainstream games. It may be interesting to discuss whether that holds true in this game: though Lovecraft’s work is problematic in many ways, it can hardly be said to present a narrative of conventional heroism.
Conversation on Discord, game-streaming via OCTGN on twitch.tv/8mph1.
Minecraft this Thursday! 8:30 pm EDT / 5:30 pm PDT.
EMILY: (To Ben) One of the first uses of the term grotesque to denote a literary genre is in Montaigne’s Essays. The Grotesque is often linked with satire and tragicomedy. It is an effective artistic means to convey grief and pain to the audience, and for this has been labeled by Thomas Mann as the “genuine antibourgeois style”.
BEN: Literary works of mixed genre are occasionally termed grotesque, as are “low” or non-literary genres such as pantomime and farce. Gothic writings often have grotesque components in terms of character, style and location. In other cases, the environment described may be grotesque – whether urban (Charles Dickens), or the literature of the American south which has sometimes been termed “Southern Gothic”.
BOB: In the 16th century, such artistic license and irrationality was controversial matter. Francisco de Holanda puts a defense in the mouth of Michelangelo in his third dialogue of Da Pintura Antiga, 1548:
“this insatiable desire of man sometimes prefers to an ordinary building, with its pillars and doors, one falsely constructed in grotesque style, with pillars formed of children growing out of stalks of flowers, with architraves and cornices of branches of myrtle and doorways of reeds and other things, all seeming impossible and contrary to reason, yet it may be really great work if it is performed by a skillful artist.”
STEVE: Wow, was that a quote block?
EMILY: Vasari, echoing Vitruvius, described the style as follows:
“Grotesques are a type of extremely licentious and absurd painting done by the ancients … without any logic, so that a weight is attached to a thin thread which could not support it, a horse is given legs made of leaves, a man has crane’s legs, with countless other impossible absurdities; and the bizarrer the painter’s imagination, the higher he was rated”.
STEVE: Well, that seems sort of harsh. Should we Discord at 8:30pm EDT? Is Discord a verb? I guess it is now. Let’s do that.
Minecraft this Thursday! 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.
This month, we look at Heaven’s Vault (2019). It is available on Steam, GoG, and PS4.
To start the conversation, play (or watch) at least the first hour of Heaven’s Vault (2019). This will give you a good idea of the use of language within the game. One of the first major choices, and the axis around which the game’s themes turn, is the interpretation of an ancient language and how it affects how characters think about the past and plan for the future. During different points in the game, decisions can be made around not only which characters to support and include on your journey, but also how an ancient civilization is contextualized through fragments of its language and their connection to each other.
A concept we will probably discuss in connection to this game is linguistic determinism (and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). How much does language affect our ability to think outside of it? And, in connection to Heaven’s Vault (2019), how has the competing stories of the “heaven’s vault” come to define the characters in the story and how they understand their world(s)?
Generally, it takes between 13-25 hours to finish the game, depending on choices made and what is explored. To exhaust all choices, upwards of 40 hours. Investing around an hour to play or watch will give you a good look into the basis of much of the game. However, experiences can differ considerably between players, so we will also probably discuss what we saw and who we decided to side with at different points or what places we invested more time in exploring. For those able to finish it (or watch the final choices), we will also discuss what happens with the titular location and how different character’s interpretations affect its meaning.
We will meet on Discord at 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.
Minecraft this Thursday! 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.
