Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
English 380 – Media and Society: Game Culture
Stuart Moulthrop
Fall, 2011 - Wednesdays 11:00 am – 1:40 pm
COURSE PREVIEW
This is not the actual syllabus for the class. We may change assignments and activities before the start of the fall semester. However, this preview should give you some sense of the scope and major concerns of the course.
Brief Description:
This is a first course in the critical study of games, especially videogames, and the culture of participatory media to which they belong. It will introduce the concept of games and play as part of a meaning-making activity; it will survey forms, conventions, and practices that inform the design and reception of games; it will outline major theoretical trends within the emerging field of Game Studies; it will examine the place of games in contemporary culture, and consider some of the problems and challenges they posefor our society.
The course is intended for students in any major who want to think critically, creatively, and (yes)seriously about inherently playful media. The work will involve a certain amount of reading and writing (critical evaluation of games, applications and evaluations of theory), and also a good deal of game play, both in and out of class. Some fun will be unavoidable.
Videogames? In an English course?
With some good reason, leading thinkers question the relationship of game studies to literature. Jesper Juul, whom we will be reading, has been notably skeptical about narrative. Among the questions he raises: Is the function of story in game play the same as in poems, novels, or films? Do games even involve stories? Are players the same as readers? Is a game designer an author? What does it mean to speak of games as texts? Should literary people stick to books, and leave the gaming world alone?
These controversies usefully differentiate what happens on the page, the cinematic screen, and the game board or console. While the gap between games and literature is probably larger than that between film and literature (or indeed, between games and film), there are still good reasons to approach games – carefully – from fields likeliterature, linguistics, and film studies. Many major thinkers in the field come from such backgrounds (Espen Aarseth, Ian Bogost, Mary Flanagan, James Paul Gee, McKenzie Wark). Despite the differences, games and literature still share some common ground, if not so much in the area of narrative, then perhaps in rhetoric.
Gee famously asked, "how will we 'read' games?" That won't be the central question of this class;but we will look into the ways games operate as semiotic systems, or texts, and how those systems work within a larger scheme of culture.
Required Texts
Jesper Juul, Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT Press, 2005. About $15.
Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Vintage, 2010. About $10.
Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames. U. Minnesota Press, 2011. About $15.
Neal Stephenson, Reamde: A Novel. Perfect Paperback, 2011. About $25. (Cheaper editions may be available soon.)
Geoff Keighley, The Final Hours of Portal 2. Valve Software. About $5.
Also excerpts from many other books and articles, available online in PDF. Assigned reading per week will generally not exceed 150 pages.
You will be required to purchase at least one reasonably priced videogame (under $25). A second game for PC or smart phone (about $10) will be optional.
We will try to hold the cost for books and games under $100. If you're willing to buy second-hand, you should be able tosave substantially.
Assignments and Activities
You are required to attend both lecture and section each week. Lectures create context and focus for discussion in section of critical and theoretical texts. Papers and other analytical projects are expected to draw productively on both lecture and discussion. In section, there will be a quiz each week on the assigned reading. In lecture, part of each meeting will be devoted to Research in Play (RIP), a live gameplay session with questions and discussion, leading to a writing assignment to be fulfilled on a D2L forum.
There will be a 1000-1250 word reflective paperdue before midterm, and a comparative paper looking at key aspects of design and play in at least two games. A longer research paper or final project is due at end of term.
Options for the final project may include: running and documenting a campaign in a role-playing game (RPG); designing an original RPG with a tool such as the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS); curating a Web gallery of important or noteworthy games; operating a game criticism collaboratory in which you play a group of games, observing, recording, and analyzing your mutual experience; developing derivative work from a videogame, such as fan fiction or machinima; and writing basic design documents for a proposed game.
Games We May Discuss and/or Play
World of Goo * Mass Effect 3 * L.A. Noire * Flow * Braid * Varicella * Fallout: New Vegas * Elder Scrolls: Oblivion * Elder Scrolls: Skyrim * The Airport Security Game * JFK Reloaded * Half-Life * Grand Theft Auto IV * Katamari Damacy * A Slow Year * Shadow of the Colossus * The Secret of Monkey Island * Passage * LEGO Harry Potter * Heavy Rain * The Stanley Parable * Riven * Portal 1 and 2 * Lord of the Rings: Return of the King * Dear Esther * Riven * Carcassonne … and anything new and interesting …
Possible Outline of Weekly Topics
1. Games and/as culture: the changing legal and institutional status of computer games within an increasingly complex and playful society.
2. Medium, technology, and industry: what games are made of, how they are made, and their economic context.
3. Response, engagement, and play: foundations of critical response to games; major contributions to theory; the problem of serious play, or dancing about architecture.
4. Games, stories, and beyond: the dispute between narratology and ludology; limits of storytelling in participatory media; "ludonarrative" and "alterbiography."
5. Worlds of text, or old school: interactive fiction (text adventure) as the direct intersection of play and story; worlds, world-models, and performative writing; games before video.
6. Games, learning, and literacy: the cognitive dimensions of gameplay; the contributions of James Paul Gee; games and "semiotic domains;" escaping the "problem of content."
7. Game spaces: the importance of map, territory, movement, and virtual architectures in the construction of play; in other worlds.
8. Characters, playable and otherwise: the function of character and character-construction in role-playing and other games; emergent characterization; play as personal performance.
9. Games and social purpose: games serious and otherwise; the rhetorical use of games and simulations; games and politics, economics, history.
10. The dark side, or gaming and its discontents: violence and excess in videogames; entertainment and arrested development (games film; games and comics); GTA4, cocaine, and the end of writing.
11. Games as art: games as concepts and statements; games as thought experiments; games as aesthetic objects.
12. Games and cinema: video and play; games and the Spectacular; game studios and film studios; aspects of "convergence culture."
13. Games beyond cinema: participatory culture in multiple and emergent media; games and the social network; memes; machinima.
14. Make a better door: videogames and the present moment; playing through the Crash; how to make a better door than a window.
About the Faculty
Lectures: Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop joined the UWM faculty as Professor of English in the fall of 2010. He has taught previously at Yale, the University of Texas, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Baltimore, where he co-founded the School of Information Arts and Technologies and helped create an undergraduate program in game and simulation design. Graduates of that program now work at several major game studios, including Firaxis, Big Huge Games, EA Mythic, and Bethesda Softworks. Moulthrop has been on the editorial board of the Game Studies journal since its founding, and has served as respondent for game-related dissertations at several European universities. In 2012, he took part in the first international Workshop on Computer Games and Literary Theory. Moulthrop is well known both for essays on games and culture, and for various works of electronic literature. See more at pantherfile.uwm.edu/moulthro/index.htm.
Discussion Sections: Trent Hergenrader
Trent Hergenrader is completing his doctoral work in Creative Writing at UWM. His short stories have been published in places such asThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, andBest Horror of the Year #1. His academic research focuses on creative writing pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and bringing games and gaming theory to writing classes. In spring 2011, he taught a course entitled “Gaming, World Building, and Narrative,” where students collaboratively created a sprawling, post-apocalyptic version of Milwaukee populated with hundreds of people, places, and objects. In the final third of the course, students explored their co-created world through tabletop role-playing and wrote short stories based on their characters' experiences. Check out the project at Despite decades of videogame experience, he’s still rotten at wall jumps, fighting games, and ice levels.
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