Video Games and Human Values Initiative

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.

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.

Supplemental Material:

• “Magical Capitalism” by Jesse Mason
• “Wheels Within Wheels” by Frank Lantz
• “Episode 437: Slay the Spire” from Three Moves Ahead
• “The Ten Principles for Good Design: Part 2” by Mark Rosewater (Part 1 is linked in the second paragraph)