Sitting around talking about video games is not everyone’s idea of a productive way to spend your time, though it is a popular one. This is why the
Hand Eye Society has gotten together with the Toronto Public Library to offer a six-week opportunity to do just that.
Saturdays from Sept. 13 to Oct. 18 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., people who register for the program, called Game Curious?, will gather at the Metro Reference Library to try out some games, and then talk about their experience of them, what they liked, what they didn’t, how even how they were made with the people who made them.
“I usually describe Game Curious as ‘a book club with buttons’,” says Sagan Yee, who's running the program. “The idea is to provide a physical space where non-gamers and gamers alike can meet face-to-face, play games together and engage in critical discussion about the medium as an art form. The games are meant to represent a wide variety of genres, themes and developers, most of them outside the usual mainstream titles that many people think of when they hear the term ‘video games’.”
Because there are already enough venues to talk about
Call of Duty and
InFAMOUS Second Son, discussion here will focus on games like hand-drawn choose-your-own-adventure
The Yawhg.
“Video games have long been considered violent and/or mindless entertainment,” Yee says, “with a homogenous and insular community, so part of GC's mandate is to challenge those preconceptions while promoting diversity and creativity in the medium itself. That being said, I try to keep the tone fairly casual since it's open to a range of people from different backgrounds and it's important to keep it accessible.”
Registration is open to anyone (though the organizers recommend 16+), and some will be selected for a second six-week program in which they can develop their own game idea.
“Last year we had an average of around 20 people per session,” Yee says. “We don't have a rigorous registration process so it's difficult to tell how many will show up this time, but I expect equivalent or increased numbers. We have generated quite a lot of interest since the first run of the program last year, so I think word-of-mouth will have an impact.”
Yee is actually graduate of a similar Hand Eye Society program herself.
“The first time I got involved with HES was the Difference Engine Initiative back in 2011,” she says. “It was a women-only game-making workshop that ran for six weeks, in which I made my first computer game, Icarus. It ended up changing my life, though it had significant flaws- attempting to run a program for empowering women presented a lot of challenges that I'm not sure the programmers were prepared to deal with at the time. But it did provide opportunities for me to collaborate on a lot of cool game projects with many interesting people, as well as open my eyes to the importance of social justice and feminism in my work, so it was definitely a rewarding experience.”
You can register
here, or by emailing
[email protected].
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Sagan Yee
Photo: The Hand-Eye Society