Introduction to Gaming
Introduction to Gaming
Dr. Shawn Edrei
superwriter@gmail.com
As technological advances continue at breakneck speed, scholarly interest in the products of digital media has grown apace. Video games have emerged from the clouds of conservative suspicion in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to become one of the foremost industries in modern entertainment, with an increasingly pronounced impact on contemporary cultural and social phenomena worldwide. One consequence of this rapid evolution is a marked increase in the crafting and distribution of experimental forms of fiction unique to the platform, which cannot be replicated in any other medium. As a result, the many platforms through which we play are capable of producing a vast array of virtual “texts” that fascinate, frustrate and facilitate academic research.
This course will act as an introduction to the field of digital games through discussion of important critical perspectives, tracking historical developments in gaming throughout the decades, and direct experience with and analysis of several popular and “indie” games which aptly demonstrate how digital technologies have been harnessed to generate these complex narrative experiences. The course will thus show how our participation as players fundamentally challenges our most basic assumptions of “storytelling” and lays the groundwork for possible future evolutions of the medium.
The course is structured upon the following themes:
- The History of Gaming: How did we go from playing Pac-Man and Street Fighter in arcades to exploring virtual worlds on our phones? What trends defined the early eras of video games, and which of them (if any) still hold true today?
- Narrative Theory and Games: We are all familiar with concepts like “narrator”, “setting”, “character”, “fictional world” and so on – yet the paradigms that remained consistent in the progression from text to film to television have been complicated and largely subverted by creators empowered by digital and virtual technology. How, then, should we adjust and explore these critical terms when applied to games?
- Genre and Games: As the medium evolves and incorporates new types of hardware and software, a veritable explosion of new categories of games begin to emerge. Initially oriented around literary terminology – “horror”, “science fiction”, “fantasy” and so on – games have gradually developed their own typology and generic definitions. What constitutes these new genres, and how do they intersect (if at all) with their cinematic and prose predecessors?
- Authorship and Player Agency: The player’s active participation in game narratives complicates a question central to any analysis of fiction: “Who is telling this story?” While the amount of agency we express in games can vary depending on a multitude of factors, we are nevertheless play a dual role in the telling of a video game story: protagonist and co-storyteller. How does the medium navigate the middle ground between our actions and a game’s hard-coded framework and boundaries? Are we able to transcend those boundaries?
- Metafiction and “Rule-Breaking”: If games are systems of rules within which the player is able to act, what happens when metafictional elements are introduced? How have developers attempted to manipulate the rules we tacitly accept when we play? How does the player respond to characters who suddenly express awareness that they are programmed entities? And what do these experimental narratives suggest about the future of gaming?
- Modding and “Hacking” Games: As players have become more technically-minded and aware of how games are made, the phenomenon of modding – directly altering the code of the game to suit the player’s whims – has become so commonplace that many contemporary games are built to allow such modification from the moment of release. How do players typically change games? Are there any correlations between the types of game and the types of “mods” produced for those games?
- Online Worlds: The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game is a product that continues to challenge academics today: persistent fictional worlds that evolve and change even when the player is not actively engaged, in which the singular role of protagonist has shifted from individuals to collective action. We will discuss some of the most prominent online worlds, the infamous “Corrupted Blood” incident in World of Warcraft, and the ways in which these virtual constructs gradually come to resemble our own.
Requirements:
Attendance and participation (10%)
1 Midterm paper (15%)
1 Response paper (flexible deadline, 25%)
1 Final take-home exam (50%)
Bibliography: Critical Theory
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Bibliography: Primary Texts (Games)
A Dark Room
No One Has To Die
Stories Untold
Evoland
Doki Doki Literature Club
Zelda Starring Zelda
Vengeance
OneShot
