Course Information

We're going to engage games in every possible way. For every topic, we'll find Experience, Analyze, and Synthesize a piece of a game. We'll have lectures, discussions, activities, individual work, group work, and play sessions. We meet in a classroom, a museum, two different computer labs, a studio, and a library. You'll read, write, draw, observe, program, and most of all...think!

Vaccarino, Dominion, Card Game, Rio Grande Games, 2009

I want you to get comfortable learning new things, in new ways. So process is a major theme of this course. We're going to learn how to learn, and how to work. Games are interdisciplinary projects. From studying them, you'll gain new techniques for approaching challenges that can be applied to any topic, not just games.

Now, some things won't be new for you: maybe you studied art in high-school or are graduating with an Economics degree this semester. When we hit a topic that you have some experience in, you'll sign up as a Leader for a few class sessions on it. For those, you and I will coordinate closely one or two weeks before the relevant sessions and will then teach them together. You'll complete the corresponding assignments with the rest of the class to give them good examples, but I'll grade your teaching and leadership instead of your homework.

The topics that we're going to cover, the grading policies, and outline of the schedule are fixed. But how we approach each topic and the rules for each assignment are up to us...we'll find what works best for everyone in the class together.

Expect to spend about 5.5 hours in class every week and between 2 and 10 hours on assignments and reading outside of class depending on the week. I'll ask you to track the time you spend outside of class. If you're spending a lot of time on the class, come talk to me about your approach. You may be approaching the work in a harder way or shooting for a larger goal than I intended.

Games are consumer entertainment products as well as cultural artifacts. You're going to play a lot of games in this course and I hope that you enjoy some of them. As a scholar of games, approach them as you would any other art form. Be critical and objective even when you're having a good time. Engage material that you don't find entertaining. Respect the creators and their work.

You will probably find some of the material in this class emotionally challenging. We'll encounter issues of sexuality, violence, race, religion, politics, and economics. People are passionate about these topics, so the best art engages them. It is natural to respond first to these topics emotionally--doing so only means that you're a sensitive human being and that the material is "working" as art to some level. But in discussing challenging work, try to separate your subjective reaction from your analysis, even as your reaction informs your understanding. Respect your peers and consider how you phrase your comments. When introducing such themes into your own creations, consider their impact on different kinds of audiences. Seek artistic merit proportional to the culutral significance of major themes--eschew cheap sensationalism.

Citations: A citation is a formal reference to a work that gives the reader enough information to locate the original work. As a scholar, it is important to cite all works referenced, whether books, web articles, games, or other forms of art. Prefer primary sources (e.g., a YouTube video of a game) to articles about your topic (e.g., a book's description of that game). For game citations, include the following information:

• title
• developer studio (analogous to an author)
• publisher (analogous to a book publisher)
• ESRB or other content rating (e.g., "E10")
• date of release; often distinguished by region (analogous to publication date for a book)
• platform (analogous to medium, for artwork. e.g., "Playstation 3")

Mobygames and Wikipedia are great sources for this information; if you have the game in front of you all of it is typically on the outside of the box. A sample citation is:

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog, Sony Computer Entertainment, Teen, Playstation 3, Oct. 13, 2009

You must of course not only cite but put quotation marks around any direct reuse of text (even if it is your own from another assignment), and must also make clear when you are paraphrasing someone else's words and cite their source.

Evaluation: Your final grade will be 50% team assignments, 25% solo assignments, 10% pop-quizzes, and 15% class participation. I drop your lowest grade in each of the first three categories. There are no formal exams. There are assigned games similar to assigned reading. I encourage you to play these collaboratively. There is a simple pass/fail 1-paragraph writeup for these just to make sure that you are keeping up to date.

The College specifies that the class GPA should be at most 3.2 for a 100-level course. Roughly speaking, satisfying an assignment's reqirements will earn you a B; moments of insight and exceptional work can raise that to an A and cursory or misdirected work will fall to a C. Ask questions if you find the rubric unclear for a specific assignment...I want evaluation of work and your standing in the course to be transparent. I grade on arbitrary numeric scales based on stated rubrics and then normalize scores across the class for each assignment. I expect that you will find this system more objective than that of an average Art course and more subjective than that of an average CS course.

Assignments vary radically. One week you'll select a color palette for a comic book character and the next you'll prove a math theorem. Quizzes are short and straightforward. For example, I'll ask you to classify an example of an artistic technique or an algorithm that we studied in the previous session. When you are a Leader for a topic I will evaluate your teaching and leadership instead of your assignments.

Participation means engaging the material, your peers, and me in meaningful ways. Asking lots of questions about things that you don't understand is a great way to participate--so is answering other people's questions. It is important that we help each other to contribute in class. Sometimes, the best way to participate is to draw someone else out rather than speaking yourself. You are participating in a very mature way when you say, "John, you wrote about Red Dead Redemption last week--how does it compare to Grand Theft Auto?" instead of directly voicing your own view.

Trust that if you come to class regularly and make a good-faith effort on the work you'll definitely pass with at least a C+ (even if you have no aptitute!) and if you demonstrate that you've learned something as well you're probably in B territory.

Team Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Sony Computer Entertainment, PS2 2005, PS3 2011

Late Work: Assignments and exams are due at or before their deadlines. Late work will not be graded. This keeps you from overextending yourself and means that everyone in the class has the same amount of time. If you know that you'll be on a trip, then just start and turn in your work early. Assignments due at the beginning of class are really due then--it is too late to run to the library and print it. Don't worry if you have an emergency or bad week--that's why I drop the lowest grades. If you have two emergencies, then please let me know what is going on and talk to the dean's office for support.

Team Work: For team work, I usually assign the same grade to all team members. Managing a team is a topic that we study, and part of your responsibility is making sure that your whole team crosses the finish line together. However, if I believe that one team member was delinquient beyond what the team can reasonably accomodate, I may assign different grades.

Process: Most of the time I'll evaluate how you approach your work rather than the absolute quality of the result. You'll score higher producing a "bad" result with the right process than a "good" result with the wrong one. A frustrating aspect of learning new methods is that often an amateur sees more success with an ad-hoc approach than a novice with principled approach. Don't succumb to temptation and just hack it--the principled approaches unlock the road to greater successes and generalize to broad domains.