Category Archives: Symposium

For this month’s Symposium, we’ll be discussing Portal and Portal 2.  The question that I’m most interested in exploring is how the two games relate to each other: in what ways does Portal 2 behave as a traditional sequel to … Continue reading →

This month’s symposium is hosted by Pat Holleman.  Quoting Pat: For a long time, the “J” in JRPG signified only the country of origin for games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Breath of Fire and Ys.  Over time, the Western … Continue reading →

Hopefully, we can generate an aphorism or two about the intersection of emergent play in a historically-inflected possibility-space and story-telling. I’m thinking we’ll use the Civ series as our touchstone, but I don’t want to be restrictive. 8:30 Eastern, 5:30 … Continue reading →

We didn’t manage to have our February Symposium on Darkest Dungeon as scheduled, so we postponed it until March: we’ll instead meet again this week (March 2nd), at the new time of 8:30pm EST / 5:30pm PST.  See Steve’s earlier … Continue reading →

Our past explorations of procedural generation have confronted the tensions between design of the unknown and its representation. For Spelunky to live, death had to lose its way in the winding tunnels, while the more procedural whims of King of … Continue reading →

For the December Symposium, we’re talking about Persona 4. I’d like to understand how it uses a “less is more” (at least compared to traditional video game values) approach to become a game that I found remarkably moving: in particular, how … Continue reading →