With the changes in Ning, we've decided to open up a new branch office in WordPress, especially for planning our multiplayer nights, which as you know are usually on Thursdays at 9:30 Eastern.
With it comes an easy to remember address:
vghvi.org, and an easy way to subscribe either to all VGHVI content or just to event-related content. We hope to see you over there, and especially at an upcoming multiplayer night. This Thursday we're…
Added by Roger Travis on August 8, 2010 at 7:30pm —
No Comments
I took my son to a friend's house the other night and they had four X-Boxes setup. Gaming is a big deal with teens these days. A
Facebook Application Analytics survey revealed that games are growing among teens. I would love to have some insight on how to address the issues at hand with my teens.
How are you all teaching kids to discriminate between decent and repulsive…
Continue
Added by Cammi Madison on April 3, 2010 at 11:45am —
4 Comments
Hello everyone! I write about virtual worlds at my personal blog
Look In The Air. Many of the posts are not directly related to the subject matter of this community, so I don't plan on posting everything I write to VGHVI. For topics that do overlap, I will try and add them. Thankful for the opportunity to contribute!
Richard
As I…
Continue
Added by Richard Huskey on February 10, 2010 at 1:18pm —
No Comments
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
Added by Roger Travis on February 8, 2010 at 9:47am —
No Comments
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…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on February 4, 2010 at 5:19pm —
2 Comments
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…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on February 2, 2010 at 9:06pm —
1 Comment
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…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on January 25, 2010 at 3:27pm —
1 Comment
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…
Continue
Added by David Carlton on January 17, 2010 at 12:30am —
2 Comments
Seven VGHVI'ers had a remarkably fun and interesting time last night playing Bioshock simultaneously and talking about it on Skype. To my surprise, I managed to record a good portion of it in passable audio (with the unfortunate exception of Jonathan Mills' contributions, which are terribly muffled, though decipherable with patience).
The whole thing was so rewarding, and the editing was so (relatively) easy that I'm interested in finding out whether we should do this on a regular…
Continue
Added by Roger Travis on January 15, 2010 at 12:02pm —
No Comments
Context Clues took a rare chance at some time off, so this post will cover main themes of the previous three weeks instead of the usual one-week spread. If you want to read more of what was going on over the break, check out the Context Clues and other VGHVI waves on Google Wave. We’ve got a dedicated wave to discussing and tracking posts on Dragon Age that shouldn’t be missed! (And if you’re still looking for a Wave invite, let us know!) If you can't access Wave for other reasons, there's…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on January 13, 2010 at 9:00am —
No Comments
I've written what seems to me like a great deal about
Bioshock already. I suppose I've stopped just short of anointing it as, well, the Anointed One: the Harbinger and Lodestar of Games' Imminent Profundity. (I imagine that my friend Simon Ferrari would probably disagree that I stopped short of that.) You can find a representative sample of my hyperbolic claims…
Continue
Added by Roger Travis on January 11, 2010 at 9:30am —
1 Comment
The other night I casually remarked how improved my experience with
LittleBigPlanet was when playing it multiplayer with a friend. Before this I had mentioned an interest in hosting a gaming night through VGHVI, and so thus, this Thursday, January 7, at 20.30 CST, I will be hosting people playing it. If you wish to join, please feel free to add me on PSN, my screenname is aeazel.
Why the selection?
I have…
Continue
Added by Denis Farr on January 4, 2010 at 12:11am —
9 Comments
Context Clues only explicitly mentions topics that contributed to or generated a fair amount of conversation the previous week. If you want more (and I can't blame you there), you can actually subscribe to
our shared clippings via RSS. Those clips are also searchable and mostly indexed with tags as appropriate.
Story Time!
Brian Taylor (Bitmob) goes back to the well with talk of…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on December 23, 2009 at 11:00am —
No Comments
If you're in the
VGHVI Google Group, you can find and help out on this week's
Context Clues wave. If you'd like to join the VGHVI Group or are having other problems, leave a comment here and I'll see what I can do for you!
Added by Erik Hanson on December 21, 2009 at 5:56pm —
2 Comments
A quick reminder that Context Clues is only explicitly mentioning topics that have generated a fair amount of conversation the previous week. If you want more (and I can't blame you there), you can actually subscribe to
our shared clippings via RSS. Those clips are also searchable and mostly indexed with tags as appropriate.
Gender, Sex & Sexuality
I'm sticking this topic right up front, because it deserves…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on December 15, 2009 at 12:00pm —
2 Comments
A quick reminder that Context Clues is only explicitly mentioning topics that have generated a fair amount of conversation the previous week. If you want more (and I can't blame you there), you can actually subscribe to
our shared clippings via RSS. Those clips are also searchable and mostly indexed with tags as appropriate.
Sexy, Sexy Characters
Jason Begy (GAMBIT Blog) shares an…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on December 7, 2009 at 12:00pm —
No Comments
A few of us started playing DDO on Thursdays when we didn't have the game VGHVI was playing that evening (which, unfortunately happens a lot for me). We had several reasons, I was playing it with my wife Kathryn; it was a PC Game, and -- perhaps most importantly -- they had just announced a move to a free-to-play business model. Our Thursday evening gaming only lasted for a few weeks, but Kathryn and I still play it two or three times a week. We like it enough that we moved from "free-to-play"…
Continue
Added by JoeTortuga on December 6, 2009 at 8:41pm —
2 Comments
It's starting to sound like game creation might be an ethical act. [Go ahead and insert "No duh!" here.] Here's what the internet said last week:
MIGS, War Crimes & The Games Medium
Chris Remo compiled a
rundown of coverage on the Montreal International Games Summit.
After seeing Brenda Brathwaite's talk at MIGS, David Sirlin waffles on…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on December 1, 2009 at 12:00pm —
No Comments
I've been ruminating out loud and with other on Twitter regarding ideas for how to make the link-aggregation of Context Clues 1) less insular to just the RSS feeds I follow and, 2) less work for me. Collaborative ideas have been proposed, and they appeal to me. As an alpha-stage test, here are some links with fewer and shorter summaries. If you want to give a summary in the comments below, I'll edit it in--all Paleolithic wiki-style. (Warning: These haven't had my usual 3+ passes to make sure…
Continue
Added by Erik Hanson on November 24, 2009 at 12:00pm —
No Comments
I'll be hosting a VGHVI get-together this Thursday on PSN for some Uncharted 2 co-op gaming goodness. U2's co-op mode is rock solid and a lot of fun - and I say this as a gamer who tends not to enjoy online shooters. The solo game has received plenty of well-deserved praise, but its multiplayer is a terrific extension of that experience, and it leverages many of those excellent assets.
If you've played U2's single-player mode, it's an easy transition to multiplayer, with the weapons,…
Continue
Added by Michael Abbott on November 18, 2009 at 9:43am —
1 Comment
Adding a new e-place: VGHVI.org
teens and games
Context Clues for January 2010
Burnout Paradise
VGHVI LittleBigPlanet, January 7
VGHVI DDO Online Night
Uncharted 2 co-op night
