video game studies 2019

Instructors: Patrick Jagoda (pjagoda@uchicago.edu) + Ashlyn Sparrow (asparrow@uchicago.edu)

Course Meeting Time: Monday and Wednesday 11:30am-12:20pm

Course Location: 5727 S. University Ave. 112

TA Section: Friday 9:30am-10:20am (Crerar Library 134): Zoe Smith

TA Section 2: Friday 11:30am-12:20pm (Crerar Library 134): Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield

TA Section 3: Friday 12:30am-1:20pm (Crerar Library 134): Jordan Pruett

Patrick Jagoda Office Hours: Tuesday 3:30 - 5:30pm or by appointment (Weston Game Studio)

Ashlyn Sparrow Office Hours: Thursday 2:00pm - 4:00pm (Weston Game Studio)

Since the 1960s, games have blossomed into the world’s most profitable artistic and cultural form. This course attends to a broad range of video game genres, including platformers (Problem Attic), First-Person games (Tacoma), role-playing games (Deltarune), multiplayer games (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe), visual novels (Doki Doki Literature Club), serious games (Never Alone), and many others. The quarter is organized according to concepts, such as control, choice, and failure, which have been selected to invite thought about formal, historical, cultural, and sociopolitical dimensions of games. Readings by theorists including Ian Bogost, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Lisa Nakamura, and Katie Salen will help us think about the field of videogame studies. In addition to weekly reading and a series of short exercises (designed to practice different modes of writing and creative development), students will also participate in a final collaborative group project. This is a 2019-20 Signature Course in the College.

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MATERIALS TO PURCHASE

Most game should be available for multiple platforms (PC/Mac via Steam or on various consoles). Unless otherwise specified, you should feel free to play on the platform of your choice (differences among consoles may add depth to our group discussions). All other readings and games are available online or on our class Canvas page.

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COMMUNICATION PLATFORMS

Slack: We will use Slack for ongoing conversations with both shared channels for informal conversations about games and private channels for communication with the instructor and TAs. For all course related questions, you should contact me or the TAs via Slack INSTEAD of email.

Course Website: We will use the course Wix website to access the syllabus (with links) and to post blog entries. The blog will be publicly available.

Canvas: We will only use Canvas to access PDFs of shared course readings. You will have to log into our Canvas course page, using your CNetID.

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