malvasia bianca

I’ve been hearing mention of Discord for a little while, but it seemed like it was focused on chat in support of PC games, and I don’t play games on PC. (And, for that matter, I also don’t generally play the sort of games where chat while playing would be useful.) But then we used Discord to help coordinate the Rocksmith Backstage Pass stuff, so I signed up; and I’d been noticing the Discord link on Kittens Game, so I joined that Discord as well, and I got some useful tips and a better feel for the game. And then, after connecting my Patreon account, I got added to a few more.

I’m curious about Discord for another reason, though. Over the last year or so, I’ve felt increasingly uncomfortable with participating on Twitter or with having a Facebook account; I haven’t left either site, but doing that is definitely a possibility. But I do have connections with people on both places that I’ll miss if I leave; so it seems worthwhile exploring other possibilities for spaces to chat with people. Slack and Mastodon had been candidates, but Discord seems like a possibility too?

So I’ve taken one step in that direction, creating a VGHVI Discord channel. If you’re not familiar with the VGHVI, it’s the Video Games and Human Values Initiative; it was formed with grand potential plans, but these days it’s just six of us who get together once a month to play Minecraft (on a world that we’ve been working on persistently for over seven years now) and once a month to talk about a game in depth.

Now I have a channel for the six of us to maintain contact, even if I leave other social media platforms. (At least potentially, we’ll see how the experiment goes.) But I’d be quite happy if the VGHVI Discord expanded beyond us, to include more people from the gaming circles that I’ve spent time in over the last decade. So if you’re somebody I know from blogging or Twitter or something and want to talk about video games, or about human values, or something, let me know and I’ll invite you! The sort of game chatter that we’ve done over the last few years is generally some combination of discussing relationships between games and other aspects of human experience or else trying to understand the design of games; we’ll see how the chatter in the Discord develops.