It’s the last Thursday of the month, so: Minecraft night! Thursday 2/23 at 9:30 EST / 6:30 PST, server is minecraft.bactrian.org, voice chat over vent (do we really need to use both vent and mumble or can we ditch one of them?), server vent108.light-speed.com, port 4383, we can tell you the password via in-game text chat.
Video Games and Human Values Initiative 
We need Mumble to record the conversation easily. We could, of course, move to recording on Ventrilo. So, no, I don’t think we need both. I just need to know, if I am going to continue to edit the audio, which one we want to use so I can plan for that.
I also, while I as lurking on Twitter earlier today, that you posted screenshots from the January Gaming Session, David. I sent a message to you, but I will leave it here too. If we want, in the future, I could probably arrange to do video too. I just need several days notice and then about a week to sync the episode up to it.
I was thinking, along those same lines, that if we — and I guess I am talking more to Roger and David here — want to try all playing a multiplayer game again, it might be interesting to go the tourist route and talk about the game as we walk around a world. It’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and I think, if we can find the right game and get the people together, something VGHVI might be a great place to host. It could be like those National Geographic/History shows where a group of people walk around an ancient site of a battle and tell you about its history and culture.
I like Mumble at least as much as Ventrilo, so I’d lean towards ditching the latter. As to video: personally, I’m not a fan of video podcasts in general, but maybe other people like them more than I do, and certainly short video segments could be interesting, so with the right game, I’d be up for giving that a try.
Another idea I had along the veins of talking about a game from the middle of it: as I play Ascension with Ozymandias, I’m often curious about situations where the card he chooses is different from the one I would choose in that situation, which makes me wonder if a commented game would be interesting to anybody else.
I like the idea of taking a group tour through a game – almost like a communal Let’s Play of sorts – though I wonder if we’d need to investigate something like XSplit for video broadcasting, so that we could follow along more easily.
As far as Vent/Mumble goes, I haven’t used Vent before, but I didn’t have any big complaints with Mumble last week. The only issue I had with it was that there was always a bit of a late echo in my headset whenever I talked, but that could have also been due to my hasty pre-chat setup.
That’s exactly my idea, the communal “Let’s Play”. I wasn’t going to frame it in that context because there are some bad associations with that term. But, yeah, I thought it would be really cool to have a group walk around in a game.
There are, of course, a number of issues. I hadn’t heard of XSpilt, but have tried ustream and a couple other services. (There was a time when I was going to co-host a video podcast. We did a pilot, but it didn’t go anywhere.) I have always thought it might be neat to try to link more video to talking about a *video* game — it is a visual medium after all.
I also like the idea of what you said, David. There are very few games I know enough about to talk about in detail, but the idea of bringing that type of announcer/commentary to games has always fascinated me. If we — I guess mostly me? — can get something up and running, I would love to enable other people to do that. (I might secretly be setting up a video game audio/visual-thing to help other people to do things.)
Just to be clear: we should stick with Ventrilo this week – I don’t want to change that after the post, and I don’t feel like making sure Mumble will work for Miranda’s setup. But I’m pretty sure I’d be up for Mumble for Minecraft next month.
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Pictures: http://scenes.malvasiabianca.org/2012/03/vghvi-minecraft-february-23-2012/