Exploring Humanity and Society Through Video Games

This collaborative visit brings two indie game developers, Jason Rohrer and Jonathan Blow, to SFI to give seminars and discuss their work with the SFI community. It also will bring a Psychology professor (Natalia Velez) who has been studying Jason's game One Hour One Life to SFI. This discussions will provide new perspective for both Jason and Jonathan and SFI researchers on how we think about human creativity, sociality, and societal influence. We hope that this visit will facilitate new research directions, inspire future game design, and potentially lead to collaborations between people working in these two modes of exploring what it means to be human.

Jason Rohrer has been creating independent video games since 2005. He uses video games as an artistic medium to explore various themes including meaning, mortality, love, and the nature of society. SFI Postdoc Andrew Stier and Natalia Velez, a Professor of Psychology at Princeton, have been studying one of his recent online multiplayer games, One Hour One Life, to understand and build theories about how and why human society transition from hunter-gatherer to city life.

Jonathan Blow released his first video game, Braid, in 2008 to critical acclaim. His games are known for exploring alternative game-play patterns employing time manipulations, puzzle solving, and extreme difficulty to engage players in novel ways. His second game, The Witness, was designed to reliably give players the experience of having epiphanies, and for them to learn the game universe's mechanics by exploring it rather than through exposition — much as scientists have to explore and experiment in the world. SFI Professor Cris Moore is one of the audio commentators in the recent Anniversary Edition of Braid, in which he comments on the structure of the puzzles and how they build up the player's experience over time.