Video Games and Human Values Initiative

We now have a VGHVI Discord server, to use when we want to chat about stuff between our regular sessions.  If you’re a VGHVI regular, you’re already on the server; but if you’re somebody who’s not a VGHVI regular but who would like a congenial place to talk about video games and/or human values, you’re more than welcome to join as well!

We’re not opening it up for public invites just yet, but if you know one of the regulars, just ask and that person will be happy to give you an invite. Or, if you don’t know one of the regulars, you can leave a comment here asking for an invite and saying something about how you know us and we’ll invite you that way as well.

The April Symposium will be on Celeste, with Pat leading the discussion.  Quoting Pat:

This Thursday, we’ll be looking at Celeste, the indie platformer for Steam and Switch.  Specifically, I’d like to look that the odd place Celeste sits in the audience spectrum.  Celeste is, in parts, friendly and approachable.  The easy-to-learn mechanics, narrative and cute graphics suggest a wide, casual audience.   But at other times, the game requires a huge time commitment and a either a lot of skill or a lot of luck, or both.  And there’s also “assist mode” to talk about.  The question I really want to ask is, “Is Celeste challenging its audience in the manner of a lot of great art? Or is it misrepresenting itself and acting carelessly with audience expectations?”

More experimental even than my usual fare, this symposium will seek to describe the snapstreak, and Snapchat itself, as performative play practices, and then to extrapolate from there to describe other social media practices in similar terms.

The question to which I seek an answer: what traction can we get over the function of identification in the play practices we usually describe as games from considering how we identify with ourselves as practitioners of social media? If immersion is identification with the ruleset, how do our social media performances transform us as we assume the self-images we create within the mechanics of various social media platforms? What happens to that imago, and to us, when a snapstreak ends?

Thursday, March 1st, on Skype at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.