Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
The instinct to collect, arrange, display, and share is a core piece of what makes us human. Why do we do it? What makes an inventory stressful and annoying vs. a pleasurable exercise in agency and self-expression? And how does the threat of losing all that, of death, in a videogame (and outside it) shape those actions?
Folks will learn:
- how different schools of scholarly thought think about the human relationship with objects
- -how screens change that (because how we perceive things on screens is fundamentally different from how we perceive meatspace data)
- Where the levers are to influence a player's emotional relationship with in-game objects
The instinct to collect, arrange, display, and share is a core piece of what makes us human. Why do we do it? What makes an inventory stressful and annoying vs. a pleasurable exercise in agency and self-expression? And how does the threat of losing all that, of death, in a videogame (and outside it) shape those actions?
Folks will learn:
- how different schools of scholarly thought think about the human relationship with objects
- -how screens change that (because how we perceive things on screens is fundamentally different from how we perceive meatspace data)
- Where the levers are to influence a player's emotional relationship with in-game objects
