Found Syllabi

The dream course I’m going to create in this class is a game-studies course. I’m planning on pitching it to the department this fall under DTC 338 – Special Topics. My found syllabi are thus all undergraduate courses (though their levels vary).

I apologize in advance for my found syllabi, which probably won’t be very applicable for the rest of you, as their critical lenses only partially overlap with the ones in literary studies. It might behoove you to know something about the theoretical approaches in game studies. Broadly, writing about games falls into two main categories: game design and game critique. The former is mostly the games industry’s turf, and the latter is pretty much academia’s turf. Within game studies, there are many subgroups, as the scholars hail from disciplines like literature, sociology, anthropology, education, and economics. Therefore, there are a lot of different theoretical and methodological approaches.

1. Beth E. Kolko, University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/bkolko/games/index.shtml

Course title: Digital Games

Kolko calls the class “an interdisciplinary investigation into digital games,” and its goals reflect a variety of approaches to understanding games. She spells out her course goals and objectives clearly:

Course goals

· This course provides an overview of digital games from an interdisciplinary perspective, including as a cultural artifact, a cornerstone of youth culture, an economic powerhouse, an educational tool, and a driver of technical innovation.

· This course introduces you to a variety of game genres, and discusses the social, economic, and technical impact of these genres.

· This course explores the design process for digital games.

· This course explores social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.

Course objectives

At the conclusion of the class, students will be able to:

· Describe the importance of games as an area of the software market.

· Describe the importance of games as a cultural artifact, especially with respect to other entertainment genres.

· Describe the importance of games as a driver of technological innovation.

· Describe how societal norms are reflected in game design.

· Evaluate different gaming populations and make design recommendations appropriate for those (potential) players.

· Describe how game-playing patterns reflect social codes and mores.

· Identify and explain core principles of online interaction and communication.

· Describe issues of identity and representation within games and game-playing communities.

· Describe the global scope of the games market and its implications for cross-cultural diffusion.

Each week, her class focuses on a different aspect of games:

· Identity in Virtual Environments; The User Experience of Gaming; Design

· Decisions Gender, Race, and other Audience Considerations; Issues for Designers; Avatars and In-Game Representation

· Commodification of Culture; Questions of Player Rights

· Games as Learning Tool, Informal Learning via Games

· Rule-making, Power and Control in Online Games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity

· Games as Driver of Technological Innovation, Input Devices

The class’s most interesting assignment is a weekly play diary, which I think would work well as a blog, though Kolko has her students hand in hard copies. I would also make the diary less directed than she does, though she asks really interesting questions in her diary assignments. She assigns specific games for her students to play.

The final project for this class involves designing a game and writing a theoretical justification for that game. Kolko offers several interesting suggestions for these projects, which let students work from their own programming expertise. The point is not to make fancy, polished games; it’s to apply all of the theory the class has dealt with.

2. T.L. Taylor, IT University of Copehnagen: http://www.itu.dk/courses/MSPK/F2008/

Course title: Game Culture

Taylor is a sociologist by training – her most important work so far is an ethnography of players in EverQuest – and her course reflects that approach, though it appears to be somewhat broader than her own work has been. Here’s her course description:

This course will examine computer games from a cultural and sociological perspective. Rather than focusing on tasks like level construction, it will explore the ways culture, socialization, and values are a part of gaming. Using a variety of theoretical & methodological approaches (drawn from the humanities and social sciences) a range of topics will be discussed in an attempt to understand not only the internal workings and social dynamics of computer games, but their place in the broader culture. Topics include: social processes and interaction; games as communication spaces and virtual worlds; intellectual property and commodification in games, players as producers of game content, political/ideological analysis of games; gender and race in gaming; and design & values.

Taylor’s readings are as varied as Kolko’s, and are also arranged by weekly topics. Here are her weekly topics:

· Technology & Culture

· Embodied Play

· Constructing a Project: Problem Statements, Methods, Lit Reviews, and Writing

· Avatars and Identity

· Gender & Gaming

· Game Community?

· Emergent & Distributed Culture

· Player Producers & Co-creation

· Regulating Culture & IP

· Managing Play

· Professional (Computer) Gaming

Taylor’s most interesting assignment is that she makes her students join a multiplayer space (WoW, Second Life, Xbox Live, etc.) at the beginning of the semester that will be the site of their primary field research for some kind of final project. (She doesn’t explain the final project on the website, though.)

3. Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech: http://www.bogost.com/teaching/introduction_to_computational.shtml

Course title: Introduction to Computational Media

Here’s Bogost’s description of the course’s goals:

This is the introductory course to Computational Media, a degree program at Georgia Tech jointly administered by the School of Literature Communication and Culture and the College of Computing. The degree intends to convey the history and potential of computers as a medium from the perspective of computing and the liberal arts.

Students read, discuss, and write analytically about key developments in history of digital media and the work of important theorists/inventors. They critique exemplary digital artifacts from classic programs like Zork, Weizenbaum's Eliza (an automated therapist) to the latest videogames. They also create projects within key representational traditions of computational media.

It is not often that human culture invents a new medium of representation. The computer is a powerful form of representation that is quickly assimilating older representational forms including spoken language, printed text, drawings, photographs, moving images. But the computer is not just a transmitter of old formats: it brings its own representational powers and its own new genres such as videogames, web sites, animated robots, and interactive televison programs.

This course approaches the computer as an evolving medium of expression, connected to the history of media while it is evolving its own characteristic forms. We will be exploring the unique representational properties of the computer and surveying key advances in expressive power, such as the first virtual spaces and interactive characters.

So this course, like the others, is interdisciplinary. In fact, it’s the introductory course in a cross-interdisciplinary program at Bogost’s university. Since one of those disciplines is computer science, much of the terminology in Bogost’s syllabus draws from that discipline. The course’s topics explore various “properties of the medium” of computers – special, participatory, encyclopedic, and procedural. (Bogost’s own work has attempted to combine literary and cultural theory with computational theory; his latest book combines rhetoric and computation).

The syllabus is kind of vague about the work that students have to do, though there are quizzes and a final exam. There seems to be some kind of group design project, in which past students have created simplistic games for the Atari 2600.

4. Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/%7Emurray/Games04/

Course title: Game Design as a Cultural Practice

Murray states that he focus of this course is “games as cultural artifacts and on the structural and representational elements of game design, especially electronic games.” However, the first course text, Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, is clearly from the ludology camp of game studies: the folks who view games as social practices rather than as representational texts. The practice/representation divide amongst game studies scholars used to be a major one, though it’s found some resolution and synthesis lately, as all of these courses (Murray’s included) show. Other texts come from both the design and the critique camps, though Murray apparently uses the design books in order to critique their ideological positions.

The course readings begin with really foundational stuff on gaming in general, like Callois’s Man, Play, Games. For the large project assignment, Murray lets her students choose whether to write a critical paper or to build a game prototype and rationale. Like Kolko, she makes her students play certain games. All are older (the newest is The Sims), and all are available online or in a special lab at their university.

5. Aaron Delwiche, Trinity University: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/index.html

Course title: Games for the Web

Here’s Delwiche’s description of the course’s goals:

In this course, we will conduct an ethnographic study of the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO gamers. Along the way, we will play and critically analyze a variety of videogames. In addition to exploring game mechanics and video-game aesthetics, we will investigate sociological and psychological dimensions of virtual worlds as well as social controversies surrounding game violence and gender representations.

We have three objectives:

1. to explore themes of cyberculture studies through sustained interaction with other residents of World of Warcraft

2. to understand the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO players through the use of ethnographic methods

3. to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing all types of videogames

To accomplish all this, Delwiche makes his students buy, subscribe to, and play World of Warcraft.

Awesome.

Actually, pulling that off is tricky, not only because of the cost but also because of the technology. Trinity apparently has a lab with computers that will run WoW, and Delwiche has reserved group gaming sessions in it two nights a week. I wonder if the CUE lab could handle such a thing…

Anyway, Delwiche’s course obviously has a narrower focus than the others as far as the types of games it studies. However – and this is why I study MMORPGs – WoW is such a rich, varied game that it allows player/critics to study many of the issues common to all games – representation, identity, economics, player interaction, etc. In looking at these elements of WoW, Delwiche uses a wide variety of theoretical approaches that’s similar to the rest of the instructors I’ve mentioned, but he’s clearly coming from an anthropology background.