12/18/2023 0 Comments Storywriting for games syllabusIn the other posts, I’ll delve into the week-to-week schedule. In this post, I describe the big picture: the framework, objectives, texts, and rationales that drove my decisions. I’ve cut the boring stuff-attendance policies, grade scales, semester assignments-and annotated it to clarify my purposes, reflect on the choices I made, and give at least a taste of what my students and I explored and discovered together. Many of you have asked me to share my syllabi, so I thought it would be a good idea to post this, a version of the course I taught in Fall 2017. The graduate courses I taught in the Summer and Fall of 2017-and the students who took them with me-proved inspirational. So, last spring, I decided to take a different angle, to think about videogames not only as literature, but in literature.īy looking at books, movies, fan fiction, television, plays, and other kinds of aesthetic texts in conversation with videogames that are “literary,” I thought I might generate some useful insights into what videogames are, how they affect our day-to-day lives, our relationships with each other, the ways we see and hear the world, the way we imagine time, space, love, learning, and so on. Why wouldn’t I incorporate those kinds of texts into my thinking about videogames? I was working with students who were creating their own videogame literature: fan fiction that shipped Overwatch characters intense conspiratorial conversations about obscure points of Dragon Age lore livestream performances on Twitch poems about Pokémon and the art-deco tragedies of Rapture cosplay that brought 16-bit heroes and villains into the halls of our Humanities and Social Sciences building. It wasn’t just novels and movies that got me thinking along these lines. Wilson and John Joseph Adams in Press Start to Play in television series like Halt and Catch Fire and Westworld in movies like WarGames and Edge of Tomorrow ( or whatever the spork that movie’s called). ![]() īut as rewarding as that approach was, I was having trouble not being distracted by all the fun, interesting, occasionally mind-blowing literary stuff about videogames I was finding in, of all places, literature: in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series and Hazel Newlevant’s buh-rilliant collection of short graphic fiction by women gamers, Chainmail Bikini in Neil Stephenson’s Reamde, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and the stories collected by Daniel H. ![]() Rather, I’m asking a question in full acknowledgment of the distinct nature of the videogame medium and the history of critics imposing a literary model on videogames: How can the tools of literary criticism help us better understand videogames?Īnd I’m asking what I think is an even more interesting question in response: How can videogames help us better understand literature? And part of that understanding is recognizing the limits of literary criticism and the literary model. ![]() (I saw a few of you starting to move towards the comments section. No, I’m not imposing a literary model on videogames. In other words, when I’ve taught video games as literature, I’m applying to videogames the same kinds of critical tools that I would apply to novels, plays, poems, and movies. In those courses, we explored all kinds of thing, including the often delicious tension between rules and fiction (thanks, Jesper Juul!) the ways videogame designers construct narratives, characters, and worlds how videogame fictions change as they are told and retold in different media or by different players how videogames represent race, gender, sexuality, and class and so on. TEACHING AND LEARNING BETWEEN VIDEOGAMES AND LITERATUREįor the last several years, I’ve taught undergraduate and graduate courses that explore videogames as works of literature. For a general description of my critical framework and purposes, see the first post in the series, “ What is videogame literature?” This is the fourth in a series of posts dedicated to works of videogame literature and theater-not videogames that are literary or theatrical, but rather novels, plays, television series, graphic novels, museum installations, poems, immersive theater, and movies that represent in some fashion or another videogames, videogame players, and videogame culture.
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