After our first meeting, we’ve come away with a good understanding of the kinds of places we want to go, the experiences we want to share, and the aspects of games that we want to explore.
Games are a young medium, and a medium catering to a very broad audience, that unfortunately doesn’t always appreciate the kinds of very intelligent and subversive game design that new developers, especially indie developers, are coming up with – games that challenge you not just as a player, but as a person. I think there is a lot of fun to be had from exploring games and their ultimate potential, exploring choice, consequence and how games allow us to inhabit roles in fantastic worlds we wouldn’t otherwise be able to be a part of. We can assert our will and our choices on a game, and I think that’s a really interesting thing to be able to explore. Watching others play games and see the choices they make compared to you is a great way to gain a deeper appreciation for a game, and it’s one of the ways we’ll be proceeding from here.
To start the group we’ll also be looking at a book available here, reading the introduction for this week as we figure out how we approach games as things to be analyzed and enjoyed as works of art in their own right.
Hope to see you around!