This week’s game is Minit, with Ariel leading the discussion. Quoting them:
Minit is a Legend of Zelda-inspired game where the world resets every 60 seconds. We will be comparing Minit’s loops with the play experience of Baba Is You, and possibly traditional roguelikes.
Discussion will start at 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.
Minecraft this week! Thursday at 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.
Our first Symposium of the decade will be on Baba Is You, hosted by Pat. He says:
Baba is You is a puzzle game in which the player can directly alter the rules. At first, this simply means changing victory conditions to suit the player. As the game goes on, things get much more complicated. We will be playing the game with an eye to how the logic of the puzzles comes to reflect the logic of game development itself, especially code and overlapping rulesets.
Discussion starts at 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST, over Discord.
Our final Minecraft session of the year will be this Thursday; 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.
Can playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic save civilization? We’re going to find out!
We’ll discuss the question on Discord, from several different perspectives, as I play the classic RPG this Thursday at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT. Stream on twitch.tv/8mph1.
Among other things, I’m going to be inviting your thoughts about the state of the Star Wars storyverse as a whole and using KOTOR as a way into how interactivity functions within it. If we end up deciding to devote a future symposium to Jedi: Fallen Order, well, I suppose that’s just how it goes.
Minecraft a week early this month, because of Thanksgiving; 8:30pm EST, 5:30pm PST, voice chat over discord.
As we’ve made our way through various roguelikes in symposiums past, we’ve often discussed how discovery of their mechanics is one of the genre’s most satisfying rewards. Deckbuilders and collectible card games operate within a similar design space, but they offer a totally different lens to it, as players have immediate access to the game’s mechanics and are asked to not only discover their interactions, but optimize them to have a chance at victory.
Slay the Spire and Magic: The Gathering offer two different variations on this exploration of player-driven procedurality – are both of them successful? If they both succeed, do they do so in different ways?
We’ll discuss all of this and more on Discord this Thursday at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.
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