Video Game Genres
This course provides a survey of console/PC video game history through the lens of four common video game genres: platformer, role-playing game, action-adventure, and first-person shooter. With a focus on the history of these genres in the 1980s and 1990s, we will critically trace the history of their visual aesthetics and game mechanics. This course asks: what defines these genres? How have they changed over time? What forms do they take (visually and mechanically)? How do other art and media inform their formal qualities? And how did technological and industrial practices help establish these genres?
History of Video Games:
An intro to methods of writing, criticism, and historiography.
An introduction to college-level writing, humanities criticism, and video game history. The class provides a survey of video game history from the 70s to present day. It presents concepts about video game forms and mechanics, design principals, and genre conventions. These concepts are understood historically, as products of history that change over time. Throughout the course, we build upon writing exercises to learn how to describe, analyze, and critique video games. These skills are widely applicable to other writing contexts that prepare students for writing assignments in later college courses—as well as in a professional setting.
Animating Across Cultures
This course looks at the history of 2D animation from a transnational context, specifically between the U.S. and East Asia. By looking at the history of animation from the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and China, this class understands animation as a set of techniques that emerged in a transnational context. It discusses key animated films and TV shows that were produced and distributed in both the East and the West. By focusing both on the industrial background of these productions, as well as a history of animation techniques, we trace animation as a transnational form of media.
Playing with Gender
“Playing with Gender” takes a two-pronged approach to teaching issues of gender and sexuality in video games. First, we learn about and discuss ongoing debates in feminism and queer theory as the basis to critique mainstream video games. In what is now the most lucrative medium, women and LGBTQI+ identities are historically underrepresented or represented in problematic ways. More recently, controversies like GamerGate and the ongoing toxicity of online gaming culture points to a longer trend of more fundamental problems within video game development and communities. This portion of the class teaches how playing games can be mobilized into a mode of cultural critique.
Second, with the rise of digital distribution and independently developed games, previous forms of gatekeeping are less strong. Independent video games have given rise to an alternative canon of games that deal with issues of gender and sexuality by simultaneously challenging the very form of gaming (more than just creating a female protagonist in a traditionally male role). We will study games such as Gone Hope and Christine Love’s work, which are often autobiographical of her life as a trans-lesbian, to discuss ways in which both form and content can be used to challenge historically dominant video game tropes.
Readings would include work from William Cheng, Bonnie Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer, as well as critical work of gaming communities by T.L. Taylor, Adrienne Shaw, and Mia Consalvo.
Note: This class was listed for summer of 2020, but was cancelled due to COVID-19 cutbacks. Much of the prep work is complete, however.