Dream

2-24

Here’s a revision of my description of my dream course, as well as its goals and topics.

As videogames become a more potent cultural medium, the burgeoning field of game studies is trying to figure out what exactly these games mean to us. It’s a truly interdisciplinary field, with scholars coming from literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, and economics. Each one of these disciplines has its own arsenal of theories and methods. In fact, there are so many perspectives being leveled at games right now that to try to understand all of them in a single class would be overwhelming. However, most of the discussions of games in academia right now approach the topic from one of two opposing points of view:

Games are texts.

Games are practices.

The former point of view generally comes the humanities, and the latter generally comes from the social sciences. It’s caused some bitter debates, and we’re going to look at some of them. But, as David Buckingham notes in the recent book Computer Games: Text, Narrative, and Play, “This tension between textual analysis… and audience-based research… is impossible to ignore… precisely because the game text is playable: it is only realized through play, and play is a lived, social and culturally situated experience.” We’re going to face this tension head-on – we’re going to break the dichotomy. Starting from the position that games are both texts and practices, and by studying a variety of actual games, we’re going to explore the following questions:

• What ideologies underlie these games’ visual, spatial, textual, oral/aural, and procedural design?
• How do these games borrow from their parent media, and how are they unique?
• How do these games combine narratives and rules to simulate systems?
• How do these games represent identity?
• How do players adapt to, modify, and subvert these games’ representations and rules?
• How do players construct/perform identities?
• How do players interact with each other, both within game worlds and outside of them?

2-11

The goals for my dream course are very similar to those of the five courses I’ve studied today. I imagine a course that’s an introduction to the game studies field, sampling the rich variety of theories and methods that scholars are bringing to the table. I’m interested in videogames as both artifacts and practices (though I’m better trained to look at them as artifacts). Here’s a tentative list of course goals and topics, cribbed from my “found syllabi”:

Course goals

• To explore games as cultural artifacts, understanding the ideological foundations of their designs.
• To explore gaming as a social practice, studying social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.
• To discuss the social, economic, and technical impact of games.

Course topics

· Identity in virtual environments; avatars and in-game representation

· Games as simulations of systems and procedures

· Rule-making, power and control; player rights

· Intellectual property; players as producers of game content; modding, hacking, cheating

· Social processes and interaction between players

· Distributed Culture

· Commodification in games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity