It was great to see people again today! We discussed Nguyen’s chapter on games and agency. The idea that games are tools that inscribe agency is a fascinating one. We are goal-oriented when we play games, and it is interesting to consider our capacity to pick up a game, play it with a goal in mind, and then immediately drop said goal when we stop playing the game. We also brought up morality and moral judgements, imposed on us by the developer. The moral frameworks of each game are something that are worth thinking about, as we must examine how the rules of the game intersect with the fiction.
We started the 2009 horror/thriller Silent Hill: Shattered Memories this week, and plan to continue playing through it next week. The game is particularly relevant to the question of developer-enforced moral judgments, as the game invisibly judges the player on a number of similarly-invisible metrics. The psychological profile it creates might not be accurate, but it is very interesting. As is the question: do we play the game as ourselves, or do we play as the main character, Harry, searching for his missing daughter? When we play a game like this – what is the goal? The goal of a more ambiguous game may differ from player to player, which is what makes playing games like this communally such an enlightening experience.
This coming week, we’ll be reading the introduction of Astrid Ensslin’s “Literary Gaming”, as way back when (in 2021!) it was the first complete reading we did for the group. The name of the group was derived from the book, and the book still acts as a kind of mission statement, defining what exactly a literary game is. I felt it worth including this week as it still works well as a definition.
Looking forward to seeing everyone next week!