Video Games and Human Values Initiative

This month’s Symposium, led by Pat, will be on Invisible, Inc.  Quoting Pat:

This week we will be looking at Invisible Inc., from the creators of Mark of the Ninja.  It makes for an interesting comparison to Into the Breach.  Both games are technically in the same genre, that being turn-based strategy.  And certainly, both games are difficult and require a lot of tactical thinking. But there’s a huge difference in the kind and amount of information each game provides to its players.  There are many aspects of Into the Breach which are unknown: map layouts, enemy decisions, random rewards.  The player has several different means of anticipating those things, however, and so we might call them “known” unknowns.  Invisible Inc, on the other hand, conceals more than it reveals, thus giving the player “unknown” unknowns.  We’ll talk about the meaning of the two systems and the design philosophies they reflect.

We’ll meet this Thursday at 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.

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