Video Games and Human Values Initiative

With any luck, we’ll get into the combat tutorial this time around!

Come join me as I play through the beginning of Torment: Tides of Numenera on https://www.twitch.tv/8mph1 and let’s discuss the game itself and my performance of it on Discord.

When last we left the game, if I recall correctly, we were greatly intrigued, though largely unconvinced by the game’s various ways of framing choices as “mattering.” One area of focus on which we hoped to keep an eye lay in the construction of binary gender as a game-choice, and the various modalities of “mattering” that might invoke and inform.

Questions I’m hoping to continue considering:

• This is a game designed above all to make the player feel their choices matter. How is that reflected in the moment of performance?
• How does that “mattering” affect how a player does perform?
• How do various familiar RPG mechanics, like dialogue-trees and combat, reflect or not reflect “mattering,” and how do they thus relate to the immersion or perhaps the “disimmersion” of the game?
  • In particular, how does the operation of binary gender, at any level, play in or not play into “mattering”?
• How do we feel about a more-or-less traditional RPG after our travels through rogue-likes and rogue-lites and Yakuza? How is this like Flip-Flop Solitaire, or not?

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