The November Symposium will be on Magicka, hosted by Pat Holleman. Quoting Pat:

In Western game design criticism there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the value of systems in games over content in games.  Magicka is one of the best examples of this trend taken to its extreme.  Magicka offers extremely deep and highly versatile game mechanics, but fails to exploit those systems because its content is so repetitive, lackluster and limiting.  We’ll talk about how the game promises a ton through its tutorial and first few minutes of live play, but then abandons almost all pretense of variety and throws the same situation at the player dozens of times.  I recommend everyone play the game about 20 minutes past the first sleeping giant, at least.  That will give you a very good picture of what the rest of the game is like.

We’ll meet on Skype this Thursday at 9:30pm EDT / 6:30 pm PDT.