Posts Tagged ‘game studies’
Revised Game Studies Syllabus for Spring 2023 (“Oops, All Disco Elysium”)!
With my new role as chair, I’ve only got one class this term, but it’s a good one: a upper-division version of my Game Studies class, with this term’s special Disco Elysium focus. Here’s the week by week:
DAY | DATE | ASSIGNMENT | |
W | Jan 18 | START | FIRST DAY OF CLASS |
F | Jan 20 | NARRATIVE | Game: The Stanley Parable Corey Mohler, Existential Comics: “Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd” Interview with Davey Wreden, Creator of The Stanley Parable |
M | Jan 23 | ART | Game: Doom Roger Ebert, “Doom,” “Critics vs. Games on Doom,” “Why Did The Chicken Cross the Genders,” “Video Games Can Never Be Art” Ian Bogost, “Art” |
W | Jan 25 | MEANING | Game: Journey Mäyrä, “What Is Game Studies?” and “Meaning in Games” |
F | Jan 27 | CHOICE | Game/Film: Black Mirror:Bandersnatch (in-class viewing) |
M | Jan 30 | DESIGN | Game/Film: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (in-class viewing and discussion) Nele Van de Mosselaer and Stefano Gualeni, “The Implied Designer and the Experience of Gameworlds” |
W | Feb 1 | FILM | Galloway, “Gamic Action, Four Moments” |
F | Feb 3 | DISCO! | DE: CHARACTER CREATION SCREEN AND GETTING OUT OF YOUR HOTEL ROOM |
M | Feb 6 | ROLEPLAY | Game: Dungeons and Dragons Vox.com, “Dungeons and Dragons, Explained” Aaron Trammell, “From Where Do Dungeons Come?” Aaron Trammell, “Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons and Dragons” |
W | Feb 8 | CRITIQUE | Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild Gerry Canavan, “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene” |
F | Feb 10 | DISCO! | DE: Day 1 |
M | Feb 13 | HABIT | Game: Tetris Bogost, “Habituation” Chris Higgins, “Playing to Lose” Sam Anderson, “Just One More Game…” Film excerpts: The Ecstasy of Order |
W | Feb 15 | ADDICTION | Game: Candy Crush, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap!, etc. Ramin Shokrizade, “The Top F2P Monetization Tricks” June Thomas, “Sugar Coma” Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman, “The Most Realistic Game Ever” Ian Bogost, “Rage Against the Machines” and Cow Clicker |
F | Feb 17 | DISCO! | DE: Day 1 (replay) |
M | Feb 20 | VIOLENCE | Game: Doom revisited, Call of Duty, etc. Galloway, “Origins of the First Person Shooter”and “Social Realism” Ludus Novus, “Why So Few Violent Games?” |
W | Feb 22 | EMPIRE | Bogost, “Titilation” Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, “Designing Militarized Masculinity: Violence, Gender, and the Bias of Game Experience” Mathieu Triclot, Raphaël Verchère, “Video Game Violence: A Philosophical Conversation with Mathieu Triclot” |
F | Feb 24 | DISCO! | DE: Day 2 |
M | Feb 27 | SIMULATION | Game: Sid Meier’s Civilization, etc. Galloway, “Allegories of Control” Kacper Pobłocki, “Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization” |
W | Mar 1 | IDEOLOGY | Game: SimCity, etc. Ava Kofman, “Les Simerables” Mike Sterry, “The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City” |
F | Mar 3 | DISCO! | DE: Day 3 |
M | Mar 6 | DECEPTION | Game: Werewolf, etc. Nathan Cutietta, “A Mental Model Approach to Deception in Single Player Games” |
W | Mar 8 | WORK | Mäyrä, “Preparing for a Game Studies Project” |
F | Mar 10 | DISCO! | DE: Day 4 |
M-F | Mar 13-17 | PAUSE | SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS |
M | Mar 20 | ENDGAME 1 | Disco Elysium endgame discussion |
W | Mar 22 | ENDGAME 2 | Disco Elysium endgame discussion |
F | Mar 24 | ENDGAME 3 | Disco Elysium endgame discussion |
M | Mar 27 | CRITICISM | Disco Elysium criticism |
W | Mar 29 | CRITICISM | Disco Elysium criticism |
F | Mar 31 | CRITICISM | Disco Elysium criticism |
M | Apr 3 | SEQUEL | Disco Elysium 2 discussion |
W | Apr 5 | WORKSHOP | paper/project workshop (in class) |
F | Apr 7 | DEATH | EASTER BREAK—NO CLASS |
M | Apr 10 | RESPAWN | EASTER BREAK—NO CLASS |
M-F | Apr 12-21 | DLC | We will choose the special topics for this part of the class together. |
M | Apr 24 | FLOW | Stephen Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You(excerpt) Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken (excerpt) Braxton Soderman, Against Flow (excerpt) |
W | Apr 26 | RESIST | Countergames: molleindustria.org Galloway, “Countergaming” |
F | Apr 28 | TUTORIAL | GRAD STUDENT PRESENTATIONS |
M-F | May 1-May 5 | LEVEL UP | UNDERGRAD PRESENTATIONS |
F | May 9 | GAME OVER | FINAL PAPER/PROJECT DUE ON D2L BY 10 AM |

Spring 2019 Syllabi! “Classics of Science Fiction” and Game Studies
I’m teaching three courses this semester: a graduate level course titled “Classics of Science Fiction,” a first-year seminar on game studies, and the second half of our yearlong “methods of inquiry” sequence (also for first-years). You can see the full syllabi in all their glory at my website:
ENGL 6700: Classics of Science Fiction
Main texts: Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; Octavia E. Butler, Kindred; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike; Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen; Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Next Generation; “That Only a Mother,” “The Evitable Conflict,” “All You Zombies,” “The Heat-Death of the Universe”; “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” and “The Screwfly Solution,” “The Gernsback Continuum,” “Game Night at the Fox and Goose”; “The Space Traders”; criticism from Suvin, Sontag, Jameson, Freedman, Delany, Csiscery-Ronay, Rieder, and even Gerry Canavan himself
Main texts: Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Video Games; Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture; Frans Märyä, An Introduction to Game Studies; The Stanley Parable, Doom, Journey, Bandersnatch, Tetris, Candy Crush, Civilization, SimCity, The King of Kong, Braid, FIFA 19
CORE 1929H: Methods of Inquiry: The Mind
WEEK ONE—HISTORY: George Rousseau, “Depression’s Forgotten Geneaology: Notes Towards a History of Depression”
WEEK TWO—STRUCTURE: Luigi Esposito and Fernando M. Perez, “Neoliberalism and the Commodification of Mental Health”
WEEK THREE—PERSONAL NARRATIVE: Leslie Kendall Dye, “It Isn’t That Shocking”
That last one is a 1.5 credit course that’s mostly devoted to independent research in the second half, but it did allow me the chance to formalize something like a definition of the difference between the physical sciences and the academic humanities as I see them operating, at least at the level of the very extreme generalization, for better or worse:
Last semester we were working at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, exploring the ways each of these two “cultures” engage questions of knowledge production and dissemination. In contrasting the humanities to the sciences, I suggested that contemporary humanities approaches—speaking of course extremely generally—tend to extend from a few assumptions that are not always shared by the sciences (especially the physical sciences, but also some historically conservative social science disciplines like economics or political science):
1) social causation: the proposition that the best explanations for social phenomena originate in social structures, rather than in individual psychologies, pathologies, or choices;
2) social construction: the proposition that knowledge is embedded within social structures like language, ideology, history, and economics, rather than existing radically apart from social structures in supposedly objective facts or eternal truths;
3) social justice: the proposition that knowledge has a politics, and that we should choose methods of knowledge production and dissemination that help heal the world rather than do harm or simply remain neutral.
Spring 2019 Course Descriptions: “Game Studies” and “Classics of Science Fiction”
I have a pretty good schedule coming up last semester, if I do say so myself, teaching a new-ish freshman honors “Foundations in Rhetoric” course on Game Studies (modeled after my very fun, sadly defunct one-credit seminar) and a totally new grad-level course on “Classics of Science Fiction.” (I’ll also be extending my year-long, co-taught “Math Anxiety and the Mind” Methods of Inquiry course into a second half, yet to be conceived!) Here are the descriptions…
Readings:The reading list is still quite fluid (and open to requests) but major texts will likely include Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, William Gibson’sNeuromancer, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Lucky Strike, as well as films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Blade Runner; the television series The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Next Generation; and short stories from Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delany, J.G. Ballard, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).
Assignments: Class participation; weekly forum posts; in-class presentations; sample course syllabi, lesson plans, and statement of teaching philosophy