Video Games and Human Values Initiative

A new kind of conversation about games in culture

Interdisciplinary nexus based at UConn for the study of how video games are building up society. Online courses, symposia, and fellowships.

The Senior Fellows of the VGHVI

Roger Travis (Director), Classics, University of Connecticut

Michael Abbott, Theater, Wabash College

Jeff Howard, Game Design, Dakota State University

Michael Young, Education, University of Connecticut

Kirstie Farrar, Communication Sciences, University of Connecticut

Kevin Roebuck, Sun Microsystems

Gary English, Drama, University of Connecticut

Mark Pearsall, Classics, Glastonbury High School, Glastonbury CT

Manuela Wagner, German, University of Connecticut

Sara Johnson, Classics, University of Connecticut

James Portnow, Divide by Zero Games

Stephen Schafer, English, Digipen University

Members

  • Jonathan Mills
  • Roger Travis
  • Jay Pennington (aka LASSIE)
  • Richard Huskey
  • Kemuel Stewart
  • Sparky Clarkson
  • John Flanagan
  • JoeTortuga
  • Mathew Fernandes
  • Nicholas Shurson
  • David Carlton
  • Davis Hill
  • Erik Hanson
  • Gene Koo
  • Tanaquil
  • Warren Nesteruk
 

Welcome to VGHVI!

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 (see tab above). 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 at a time TBA; here's one for our multiplayer planning page.

Blog Posts

Roger Travis

"Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" as a practomime

In the wake of the exciting "Art History of Games" conference in Atlanta, where some extraordinarily interesting questions about the nature of the several things we call "games" were given room to grow, I want to treat Thursday's group playthrough of the beginning of KOTOR as an opportunity to talk about whether the thing that I'm calling "… Continue

Posted by Roger Travis on February 8, 2010 at 9:47am

Erik Hanson

Context Clues for January 2010

Hey, did anyone hear that a game called Bayonetta came out? A couple people wrote about it. I don't really want to edge in on Critical Distance's Critical Compilations, though, so I'm going to try and break some of them down into component parts about things like female sexuality and empowerment (which is the bulk of it) and about other issues in the game that showed up in other places this month, such as how games handle religion (yes, that topic is still kicking).

It seems like initial… Continue

Posted by Erik Hanson on February 4, 2010 at 5:19pm — 2 Comments

Erik Hanson

Context Clues News: January 24-30, 2010

Here's the news for last week. Lookout tomorrow for a rundown of major discussion topics in January!

Duncan Fyfe is back writing games-related fiction at Life Starts Here.

The Game Design Aspect Of The Month for February is "emotive games."

Rock, Paper Shotgun is opening a new forum for people to write for free in the… Continue

Posted by Erik Hanson on February 2, 2010 at 9:06pm — 1 Comment

Erik Hanson

Context Clues News

Please pardon our dust as we work on some new ideas for Context Clues at the VGHVI. If you're looking to keep up with what's going down, check out our Google waves. I've been careful to keep everything tagged as VGHVI and the Context Clues waves tagged as "Context Clues" as well.

And if you want to be part of the discussion on what Context Clues means to you and what you think it could come to mean, don't hesitate to speak up!

News and Events


Border House is running a series titled "… Continue

Posted by Erik Hanson on January 25, 2010 at 3:27pm — 1 Comment

David Carlton

Burnout Paradise

I'm hosting our weekly game session this week (Thursday, 1/21), and I've chosen Burnout Paradise as our game. It's a game that took me a while to warm to: it seemed like a pleasant enough racing game, with a particularly friendly online mode, but its open-world design occasionally frustrated me, because I would lose a race, end up in the middle of nowhere, and have a long drive to get to where I could repeat the race or a medium drive to get to someplace else I found interesting.

It wasn… Continue

Posted by David Carlton on January 17, 2010 at 12:30am — 2 Comments

Forum

David Carlton

Where should teachers interested in structuring a class as a game start? 2 Replies

Started by David Carlton. Last reply by David Carlton Jan 26.

David Carlton

James Paul Gee on games and learning 4 Replies

Started by David Carlton. Last reply by Roger Travis Jan 11.

Matthew Teutsch

History and its role in the Utopian and Dystopian settings. 9 Replies

Started by Matthew Teutsch. Last reply by Matthew Teutsch Oct. 1, 2009.

Latest Activity

Roger Travis and Richard Huskey are now friends
15 hours ago
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yesterday
February 11, 2010 from 9:30pm to 11:30pm
Our previous simultaneous single player foray went so well that we thought we'd do another one; given all the BioWare chatter, Roger thought it would be nice to host Knights of the Old Republic! Play on whatever platform you like; we'll be chatting…
yesterday
Richard Huskey updated their profile
yesterday
Richard Huskey Just joined the VGHVI community on @Ning. Exciting content: http://vghvinet.ning.com/
yesterday
Richard Huskey, Kemuel Stewart and Nicholas Shurson joined Video Games and Human Values Initiative
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