Video Games and Human Values Initiative

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.

This month’s Symposium will be on the game Inside.  Pat will be leading the discussion; here’s some thoughts from him to kick us off:

Playdead’s INSIDE is a platformer/horror game that tells a story without a single word of dialogue.  Or rather, it tells two different stories.  In a sense, the second story undoes the first story, although not in the same artful way that the second half of Chrono Trigger undoes the first. Indeed, the second half of the game seems (at least to me) to make the first half less impactful, upon reflection.  My question for the session is this: did the fundamental ludic product make the second story in the game necessary? That is, did the need to have an evolution in gameplay mechanics force the developers to extend the story in a detrimental way?

We’ll meet on Thursday, September 6 at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT; we’ll be doing voice chat over Discord rather than over Skype this time.