Digital Games Theory Syllabus

INDI 620G/820G // COMS 642/803 Digital Games: Theory and Research Fall 2020 My Information Class Information Professor Mia Consalvo Mondays 1:15 – 4:00 Somewhere in NDG Remote “Online” Edition mia.consalvo@concordia.ca Office hours by appointment Course Description During this global pandemic, play and games are often discouraged (if not outright disparaged) because they are activities that bring us too close together physically, when instead we should be practicing ‘social distancing.’ Worse still, the act of ‘having fun’ or being playful is often perceived as diametrically opposed to the seriousness needed to confront this situation. Yet as the weeks and months continue, many of us turn to play and games for escape, agency, pleasure, control, novelty, familiarity, sociality, and more. This special edition of the game studies seminar explores fundamental questions of how and why we play games, both in times of crisis (past and present) as well as during “regular” everyday life. We will focus on a number of issues including how varying contexts shape play, how games structure meaning making, barriers to play, the evolution of games, and different approaches to how to study games and leisure. Course Objectives After taking this class, students will be able to: Define the evolution of – and debate over – key concepts in the field Describe how research in the field of game studies has developed Critique deeply one element of games, game culture or the game industry Course Structure & Format This class will have both synchronous and asynchronous elements to it. Unless otherwise agreed upon by all members of the class, synchronous elements will be conducted via Zoom. Asynchronous elements will include use of discussion boards, email, and pre-recorded video viewing. Please note for Zoom and all other synchronous video elements, you are not required to keep your camera active, although I may ask for various audio or other signals occasionally to ensure that everyone is active and engaged in the discussions and activities. Because attendance is not mandatory, we will not be recording Zoom sessions unless everyone is in favor of doing so. Regular classes will follow this general format. Exceptions will be announced in advance: 1:15 – 1:30 General chat, informal check-ins with Mia on Zoom 1:30 – 2:30 Synchronous (live) group discussion on Zoom 2:30 – 3:00 Break 3:00 – 4:00 Activity time (breakout sessions, workshops, guest speakers, etc. either in Zoom, Online Town, or other spaces as announced; occasionally class will end at 2:30) Extraordinary Circumstances In the event of extraordinary circumstances and pursuant to the Academic Regulations the University may modify delivery, content, structure, forum, location and/or evaluation scheme. In the event of such extraordinary circumstances, students will be informed of the changes. Required Reading There are no required books for this class. All readings can be found via electronic reserve or online. Assignments All assignments are given letter grades. Assignment Due Date % of grade Introductory video September 21 5 Reading reports weekly 15 Article & Citation Analysis October 5 20 CYOC Proposal October 26 10 Progress Report November 30 25 Final Deliverable December 15 25 General course policies, procedures, and fine print Behaviour: All individuals participating in courses are expected to be professional and constructive throughout the course, including in their communications. Concordia students are subject to the Code of Rights and Responsibilities which applies both when students are physically and virtually engaged in any University activity, including classes, seminars, meetings, etc. Students engaged in University activities must respect this Code when engaging with any members of the Concordia community, including faculty, staff, and students, whether such interactions are verbal or in writing, face to face or online/virtual. Failing to comply with the Code may result in charges and sanctions, as outlined in the Code. Intellectual Property: Content belonging to instructors shared in online courses, including, but not limited to, online lectures, course notes, and video recordings of classes remain the intellectual property of the faculty member. It may not be distributed, published or broadcast, in whole or in part, without the express permission of the faculty member. Students are also forbidden to use their own means of recording any elements of an online class or lecture without express permission of the instructor. Any unauthorized sharing of course content may constitute a breach of the Academic Code of Conduct and/or the Code of Rights and Responsibilities. As specified in the Policy on Intellectual Property, the University does not claim any ownership of or interest in any student IP. All university members retain copyright over their work. Attendance: I don’t take attendance, but I do expect graduate students to place top priority on their coursework. That means showing up to each class on time, having read the assigned material and played the games assigned, and ready to participate in class discussions. If you have to miss class, please let me know as soon as possible with the particulars, and we can work out any arrangements for making up work. Late work: Please try to complete all work by due dates listed, as many assignments build on one another, and so running behind with one assignment can mean that others then are delayed in order to put the proper time into preparations. I also need adequate time to offer feedback, particularly on multi-step projects. All due dates are listed on this syllabus. However, given our current health emergency, I am happy to be flexible as issues arise. I simply ask that you keep in touch with me and let me know about issues and challenges as they emerge. Academic dishonesty: Concordia University prohibits students from engaging in academic dishonesty, which includes cheating, plagiarism, forgery, furnishing false information to the University, and alteration or misuse of University documents, records, or identification. Anyone caught cheating or plagiarizing in this course will be reported to the University for disciplinary action. The most common offense under the Academic Code of Conduct is plagiarism, which the Code defines as “the presentation of the work of another person as one’s own or without proper acknowledgement.”
This includes material copied word for word from books, journals, Internet sites, professor’s course
notes, etc. It refers to material that is paraphrased but closely resembles the original source. It also includes
for example the work of a fellow student, an answer
on a quiz, data for a lab report, a paper or assignment completed by another student. It might be a paper purchased from any source. Plagiarism does not refer
to words alone –it can refer to copying images, graphs, tables and ideas. “Presentation” is not limited to
written work. It includes oral presentations, computer assignment and artistic works. Finally, if you translate the work of another person into any other language and do not cite the source, this is also plagiarism. Students with disabilities or special needs: I would like to hear from anyone who has a disability that may require some modification of class assignments so that appropriate arrangements can be made. Please talk to me either immediately following class, or make an appointment to see me privately. Complaint procedure: If you have a question, concern or complaint about the design or content or grading in this course, you should discuss the matter with me as soon as possible. If a satisfactory solution can’t be reached, you should make an appointment with Professor Monika Kin Gagnon, Chair of the Communication Studies department. Class Schedule September 14: Welcome READ Imad Khan (April 7, 2020) “Why Animal Crossing is the Game for the Coronavirus Moment” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html WATCH “Everyone is playing video games right now. And the industry is booming” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xW5_Ivsy2w September 21: Screens are good, but fun is bad? READ Zeynep Tufekci (July 4, 2020) “Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/it-okay-go-beach/613849/ Andy Phelps (April 13, 2020) “Games in the Era of Social (Physical) Distancing and Global Pandemic” Medium, https://medium.com/@andymphelps/games-in-the-era-of-social-physical-distancing-and-global-pandemic-800590fbd893 Janine Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie & Celia Pearce (2007) “The Hegemony of Play” Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference. PLAY Space Invaders; Pac Man DUE Introductory Video (post to course Moodle site) September 28: Games and Play in Historical Context READ Johan Huizinga (1944) Excerpts from Homo Ludens, London: Routledge, pp. 1-27; 195-213 Margaret Carlisle Duncan (1988) “Play Discourse and the Rhetorical Turn: A Semiological Analysis of Homo Ludens” Play& Culture 1, 28-42. PLAY Frogger; Asteroids October 5: Theorizing play READ Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) Excerpts from The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-17; 214-231 Tom Apperley (2017) “The Right to Play in the Digital Era” in Video Game Policy: Production, Distributions, and Consumption, New York: Routledge. Suzanne Gaskins and Peggy Miller (2009) “The Cultural Roles of Emotions in Pretend Play” in Transactions at Play: Play & Culture Studies, Vol. 9, pp. 5-21. PLAY The Dreamhold DUE Article Analysis [Part 2 of class – Discuss citation findings from analysis] October 12 – Thanksgiving – No classes October 19: Play and Games in Difficult Times READ Felice Yuen (2020) “If We’re Lost, We Are Lost Together: Leisure and Relationality” Leisure Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773988 Monika Stodolska (2020) “#QuarantineChallenge2k20: Leisure in the Time of the Pandemic” Leisure Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774007 Merja Paksuniemi, Kaarina Määttä & Satu Uusiautti (2015) “Childhood in the shadow of war: Filled with work and play” Children’s Geographies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 114-127. PLAY Adventure [Part 2 of class – Workshop proposal ideas] October 26: Leisure Studies as alternative theoretical frame READ Robert Stebbins (2006) “Serious Leisure” in A Handbook of Leisure Studies, pp. 448-474. Kelly Boudreau and Mia Consalvo (2014) “Families and social network games” Information, Communication & Society, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.882964 Matthew Perks (2020) “Self-isolated but Not Alone: Community Management Work in the Time of a Pandemic” Leisure Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773999 PLAY Tuboflex DUE CYOC Proposal November 2: Methods for studying players READ Celia Pearce (2009) Excerpts from Communities of Play, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 197-211; 215-259 Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau & Mark Silverman (2009) “Two players: Biography and ‘played sociality’ in EverQuest” Game Studies Vol. 9, No. 1, http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/simon_boudreau_silverman Adrienne Shaw (2017) “Encoding and decoding affordances: Stuart Hall and interactive media technologies” Media, Culture & Society Vol. 39(4) 592-602 WATCH Game Maker’s Toolkit (Oct 10, 2017) “How game designers protect players from themselves” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8 PLAY Dys4ia November 9: Methods for studying games READ Clara Fernandez Vara (2015) Excerpts from Introduction to Game Analysis, New York: Routledge, pages TBD. Mia Consalvo & Nathan Dutton (2006) “Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games” Game Studies Vol 6, No. 1, http://gamestudies.org/06010601/articles/consalvo_dutton WATCH NYU Game Center (March 5, 2019) “Game Studies at 20” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OhKOhZMOvM&t=7s PLAY Coming Out Simulator November 16: Rhetorics of fear, danger, and toxicity READ Carly Kocurek (2012) “The Agony and the Exidy: A History of Video Game Violence and the Legacy of Death Race” Game Studies Vol. 12, No. 1, http://gamestudies.org/1201/articles/carly_kocurek Marcus Carter, Kyle Moore, Jane Mavoa, luke gaspard & Heather Horst (2020) “Children’s perspectives and attitudes towards Fortnite ‘addiction’” Media International Australia Vol. 176 No. 1, 138-151. Christopher A. Paul (2018) Excerpts from The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the worst, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. WATCH Today Show (Oct 18, 2006) “Jack Thompson about GTA: San Andreas” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey--3YV6FCw PLAY You are Jeff Bezos November 23: Gameworkers READ Aphra Kerr (2015) “The Recruitment of Passion and Community in the Service of Capital: Community Managers in the Digital Games Industry” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 177-192. Nina Huntemann (2013) “Women in Video Games: The Case of Hardware Production and Promotion” Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 41-58. Jason Schreier (August 3, 2020) “Blizzard Workers Share Salaries in Revolt Over Pay” Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-03/blizzard-workers-share-salaries-in-revolt-over-wage-disparities WATCH The Jimquisition (Sept 9, 2019) “How game companies abuse passion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMKBzwSBeS8&list=PLlRceUcRZcK0E1Id3NHchFaxikvCvAVQe&index=54&t=0s PLAY Candy Box [Part 2 of class – Discuss progress/challenges to CYOC project] November 30: The forgotten ‘ism’ - class READ Christine Ward Gailey (1993) “Mediated Messages: Gender, Class, and Cosmos in Home Video games” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 27. No. 1. Gillian ‘Gus’ Andrews (2008) “Gameplay, Gender, and Socioeconomic Status in Two American High Schools” E-Learning, Vol. 5 No. 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2008.5.2.199 WATCH CrashCourse (Sept 18, 2017) “The impacts of social class” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a21mndoORE PLAY The Oregon Trail DUE CYOC Progress Report December 7: De-Westernizing Game Studies READ Souvik Mukherjee (2018) “Playing Subaltern: Video Games and Postcolonialism” Games and Culture, Vol. 13, No. 5, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015627258 Soraya Murray (2018) “The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture” Open Library of Humanities, 4(1): 13, pp. 1-25, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.285 Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Beatriz Pérez Zapata (2018) “Who Made Your Phone? Compassion and the Voice of the Oppressed in Phone Story and Burn the Boards” Open Library of Humanities, 4(1): 11, pp. 1-30, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.209 PLAY don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story December 8: Workshop [Workshopping final deliverable drafts] December 15 DUE CYOC Final Deliverable Games to play and where to find them Space Invaders https://www.andoverpatio.co.uk/21/space-invaders/ Pac Man https://www.webretrogames.com/pacman-html5.php Asteroids http://www.freeasteroids.org/ The Dreamhold http://www.eblong.com/zarf/if.html#dreamhold Adventure http://rickadams.org/adventure/ Tuboflex https://molleindustria.org/en/tuboflex/ Dys4ia https://freegames.org/dys4ia/ Coming Out Simulator https://ncase.itch.io/coming-out-simulator-2014 Frogger https://www.webretrogames.com/frogger.php You are Jeff Bezos https://philome.la/KrisLigman/you-are-jeff-bezos/index.html don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story http://scoutshonour.com/donttakeitpersonallybabeitjustaintyourstory/ The Oregon Trail https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oregon_Trail_The_1990 Candy Box https://candybox2.github.io/candybox/  Detailed Description of Assignments Introductory video Introduce yourself to your classmates! This is a short video (1-2 minutes long) that can be shot on your phone or webcam and then uploaded to our Moodle site. Say a little something about yourself – what you hope to get from the course, your favorite game (if you have one), your most wished for superpower, and what you most want to do when the pandemic is over. Feel free to record selfie style, or over a picture of your pet or even a gif if that is more comfortable for you. Also please be sure to say your name, just so we know how to pronounce it. Reading reports Each class session, students should have posted to our Moodle site a short synopsis of each artifact assigned for the day (i.e. one paragraph per reading/game/video), as well as a brief discussion of the readings, including questions the readings and/or games and videos raised, connections the readings have to prior readings, class discussions, or contemporary media, or critiques of the readings. These must be posted by 10 a.m. the day of the class they are assigned. Points are awarded credit/no credit and are based on 11 weeks of readings during the term (no reading report is due on September 14). You are allowed to miss one week and still receive full credit for the reports. Missing more than one week will drop your grade in this area by 10% for each week missed. You are also required to respond to at least three other reports for the week, either asking follow-up questions, expanding on ideas and arguments, or answering questions posed by the original author. The Evolution of Game Studies: Article and Citation Analysis The goal of this assignment is to help you gain some perspective on how game studies research has evolved over time. To do this assignment, you’ll need to do a few things. First, you must select an article to evaluate from volume 1, issue 1 of Games & Culture, available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/gaca/1/1 This is the first issue of the journal ever published and it features mostly shorter essays arguing for the importance of various areas of study within games research. You’ll need to download and read one essay, providing a short (2-3 paragraphs) summation of the essay’s argument, and then write approximately 2-3 pages of critique following that. To do this critique, you will need to do the following: copy/paste the full citation for the essay into Google Scholar. This should give you a screen that looks like the following: Second, click on the “Cited by…” link to see (at least some of) the scholarship that has cited your chosen essay since it was published. You do not need to read or examine all the citations, but instead briefly inspect them, asking yourself the following questions to help write your critique: How many times has this article been cited? Is it still being cited now or has interest in it dropped off over time? What types of journals (their fields, disciplines, areas of study) are the citations found in? What kinds of research projects are using this research? Third, take a quick glance at a few of the most recent articles that cite your chosen essay. Is the essay mostly just a placeholder link (the author needed to justify that “x” has been studied, for example, so dumped in this citation to prove it) or is the essay actually engaged with? What does the newer research on this topic look like? Finally, close your analysis with a brief statement on how you think this essay has aged over time. Is this still a vital area for game studies? Is this author still publishing in this area? What excited you (or disappointed you) most about this essay? Would you recommend this article as still relevant to the field, or not? Why or why not? Major assignment: Choose Your Own Critique Your major assignment is to critique some aspect of games, game culture, or the game industry – your choice. Likewise, the form of the critique is up to you as well, depending on whether you want to write, record, make a game or create audio files. You can do this project solo, paired up with another student, or as a team no larger than three people. Here are the options for what you could critique, including examples: A game, game series, or game genre Game culture (paratexts; rhetoric around games such as marketing practices) Game studies (the field; its evolution; its failures) Game design (hegemonic design; pedagogical practices) Game industry (crunch culture, sexist workplaces, indie issues) Game players (trolling; diversity initiatives) Just as you need to choose a topic to critique, this assignment also allows you to designate the form the critique will take. Possible forms include: Standard research paper Let’s Play-style video critique Podcast Game (board, digital, card) Name your own form here These two elements – topic and format – should be complementary to one another. Think carefully about how the format lends itself to making a particular type of critique, as well as its potential drawbacks. How might another format push you to make a different kind of critique? To create a finished critique, the project will comprise three smaller assignments. Proposal This short paper (2-3 pages) informs me of your choice of what you want to critique, and 1-2 potential formats for doing the critique. It should also explain why this critique is important to make (the ‘so what’ question), and whether this is a group, pair, or solo project. If this is a group/pair project, the expectations for each member should be spelled out clearly. It should also include what questions you have for me as you embark on this project. Note that you cannot reserve this decision, so please choose carefully! Progress Report The (2-3 pages) progress report provides an update on how the project is progressing. Items to include: discussion of what work has been completed; what remains undone; report on peer feedback from prior class session and how advice/ideas were or were not incorporated into the project; any outstanding questions on how to proceed or resources needed to complete the project. There should also be an update on how the team is functioning. Note that even if you are working as a team, you must turn in individual progress reports. Final Deliverable The critique in its complete form. This is comprised of two components: the completed artifact, and a 4-5 page written post-mortem of the process of creating the artifact. The post-mortem should address questions such as: what were you trying to accomplish and how did it turn out? How did the form you employed influence your work? If you engaged in a creative project, what do you think are the best ways to evaluate such work? Note that even if you are working as a team, you must turn in individual post-mortems, and even if you write a traditional research paper you must turn in a separate post-mortem of the process. 2