Category Archives: Symposium

As its name might suggest, mythology has always served as the foundation for The Legend of Zelda. Throughout its history, its songs of champions found many forms across the Hyrulean ages, from the sunken legacy of Wind Waker to the … Continue reading →

The game What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) presents a series of interconnected moments revolving around a premise posed as an implicit question: in the end, are we simply stories other people tell about us? This Thursday, at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT, … Continue reading →

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 →