Week Ahead: 4

In class on Tuesday, we’ll have two primary tasks:

• We’ll continue to establish our own working definition for what a game is and to develop the basic theoretical framework we can rely on to analyze games by considering Steven Johnson’s argument in Everything Bad is Good for You and Mary Flanagan’s “Introduction to Critical Play.”
• We’ll also need to establish the ground rules for the podcast series that this class will be be publishing this semester.

Make sure you have read over the assignment page for the podcast series. You’ll be divided into 6 groups of 3 students for the podcast series, then within each group you’ll take turns rotating through the 3 different roles as you produce episodes. That means by the end of the semester we will have together published 18 episodes of a podcast series exploring how games encourage us to think, feel, and behave.

I am going to encourage you to devote episodes to exploring games that were included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality this summer. The bundle included more than 1700 independent games and raised $8,149,349.66 for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund in order to support protestors who continue to march for racial justice throughout the nation. I’ve put together a playlist called Play Make Write Think that highlights almost 50 of those games based on recommendations I’ve seen and based on my own perusal of the list of 1700+ games, just to help make the choice not so overwhelming. I purchased the full bundle and can make games from it available to you for the purposes of critical analysis in your podcast episodes.

In our class discussion on Tuesday, you will all need to be engaged in developing the rules for the series; for example, should each episode be devoted only to a single game or can we be allowed to compare two? and should we make every episode about one or more games from the Bundle, or should we allow the freedom to go outside the bundle for episodes? We will also need to come up with a title, begin drafting the text we’ll record for the introductory bumper, and think about what music we’ll use in the intro to set the tone.

After class, for the rest of the week

After Tuesday, you’ll have two short essays by Ian Bogost that will round out the theoretical foundation texts for the semester. Ian Bogost is a Professor of Media Studies and of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, has written or edited ten books on video games, and created the wildly-successful Cow-Clicker, a Facebook game critiquing Facebook games. These two essays are very short but they are fairly dense theoretical writing. Please read them carefully, paying special attention to “Media Microecology.” On September 15, we’ll have a special guest teacher discussing that essay with you so it’s very important that you come to class having read the essay and are prepared to discuss it.

I have also sent you all emails with information about the game we’ll be discussing on 9/15, Gone Home. Your side quest this week is to liveblog your playing of the game.