Date and Time: Wed 6pm-8:50pm
Room: TBD
Instructor: Zachary Horton
Class Number: 31921

This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the key relationships between play, social and technological mediation, narrative, and visual culture. It will provide a wide-ranging survey of game studies, from foundational texts in play studies through the central debates in video game studies to the most recent scholarship on gamification, tabletop gaming, identity, and scale in the rapidly expanding field of game studies. Topics covered will include the history of gaming and ritual, play and childhood, emergent and environmental narrative, gamification and capital, game theory, artificial intelligence, video games, tabletop games, gaming and scale, gaming and gender, games and empire, agency, gaming and environment, cooperative gaming, and game design as an artistic medium. We will explore why games are not only a key form of cognitive mapping in digital control societies, but also significant sites of creative expression, and perhaps most significantly, a vital paradigm to critically engage agency, identity, and decision making in the twenty-first century. The underlying argument will be that we cannot understand how power, capital, or media more generally function today without a critical theory of play and games. It is no accident that capitalism has gamified itself, nor that games have become the dominant form of narrative media on a global scale. Students from all disciplines are welcome. Final projects can be analytical (a paper or other form of media) or creative (a game or interactive fiction). Regardless of whether your goal is to engage games as cultural objects within your scholarship, to work creatively within a modality of play, or to broaden your critical methodology, my intent is that as a group we will all think, play, and create together.