The Video Games and Human Values Initiative is an interdisciplinary nexus for online courses and online scholarly activities like symposia, research fellowships, and our journal, Proceedings of the VGHVI (under construction--see tab above for the announcement). All these activities are designed to advance our understanding of how video games and their culture can shape our values constructively for the enrichment of society.

This social network is the hub, but there's one spoke that's of crucial importance, our wiki. If you're here, you should be there, too. Among other things, it's got a page devoted to the logistics of getting all of us playing together. You need to request membership to take full advantage of what a wiki can do, but I promise it's painless.

And once you've done that, I urge you also to subscribe to the RSS feed for the VGHVI blog (also to be found below). It's the best way to keep up-to-date with what's going on here.

This is an open group, so please join up if you want to take part in our new interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, even ecumenical conversation about video games, and to help shape its future. The initiative is for gamers and non-gamers, academics and non-academics, students and teachers, parents and their high-school and college kids. That is, it's for you--so don't hesitate to join if you're excited--or concerned--about what video games are doing in our society.

Here's a little video UConn did about one of the Living Epic courses, CAMS 3208 (Gaming) Homer. Enjoy!

Here's a link to the site for the "Living Epic" three-week course, to be offered again in July 2009; here's one for our multiplayer planning page.