Video Games and Human Values Initiative

It was nearly half a decade ago when we played Subset Games’ first release, FTL, and discussed its capacity for player-created narrative. The intervening years have seen a great deal of change, especially with regards to the prevalence of procedural content in gaming, so it seems fitting to kick off a new year of symposium discussion with Subset’s award-winning follow-up. How does Into the Breach’s deterministic play and legibility contribute to the micro-narratives that emerge from it? How do these narratives compare against the ones we find in other strategy games? We’ll discuss this and more through voice chat over Discord at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.

Supplemental Material:

• Austin Walker’s review of the game at Waypoint

This month’s Symposium will be on Yakuza 0.  It’s a game with an unusually detailed setting (and, even more unusually, a series with a persistently detailed setting!); I’d like to talk about how that setting drags the game’s center of gravity away from the putative plot of the game and towards the way that Kiryu’s and Majima’s daily lives are embedded in that setting.

Voice chat over Discord, 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.