Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

Games!

Things to do as you finish up the course

Here’s the prompt for the blog post from our April 26 class:

Go find a game you haven’t ever played and play it. (It should probably be something with some kind of storyline, or at least with a story that emerges from the environment as you play it.) What was it? What were your expectations and how did it meet/subvert them? Finally, and most importantly, how is the work that game is doing humanistic work? In other words, how would you relate the content of the game to the content of the class?

Things to do for the week of April 26

Here’s the prompt for the blog post from our April 19 class:

In both the readings (Bogost and Montfort & Moulthrop), there is a lot of discussion about how rules and narratives interact (and sometimes conflict). From my perspective, games are unique in that they rely on this interaction between systems (both ludic and narrative). In other words, applying Bogost’s concept of “procedural literacy” allows us to critically examine how rules constrain behavior but also allow for and emphasize certain behaviors. So my question for you is: what systems do you interact with in your day-to-day life that would benefit from a critical reading, and what would that reading look like?

Revised blog prompt (although feel free to use the original one): What did you find interesting, surprising, noteworthy, or valuable from the readings and/or games you read/played for this week?

Things to do for the week of April 19

Here’s the prompt for the blog post from our April 12 class:

You now know you’re going to be making a small game related to one of the other sections of the class. It’s going to be a rapidly developed project, so you’re not going to have much time to learn about game design or implement that knowledge. But what if that weren’t true? What if you had unlimited time and resources, or at least resources approaching those put toward major AAA games? (As an example, Grand Theft Auto V was in development for three years, had a budget of roughly $265 million, and involved a team of between three and four hundred people.) What if you had that kind of project in front of you?

What would your game look like? What would it sound like? What would the player be doing? What would the environment be like? What rules would be in place? In in the games industry, developers usually create something called a “game design document” that covers some of these questions. Although I don’t expect you to go to those lengths, you might organize your post to discuss a few key features of your dream game along these lines: story, characters, environment design, gameplay, art, sound/music, and controls/user interface.

For class this week (April 19), I’d like you to read a couple of things and also play a couple of things:

 

Previous Weeks

For the week of April 12, I’d just like you to play a few games:

As you play these games, think about all the other things you’ve covered in this class so far. You should come in to class prepared to talk about these things:

  1. What do these games do that traditional texts don’t? How do they do those things?
  2. What can’t these games do that traditional texts can?
  3. What sort of critical vocabulary needs to be developed for objects like these games that doesn’t have to be used for “normal” reading? (That is, what do you need to be able to talk about to talk about them comprehensively?)
  4. What kinds of critical approaches (that you know of from other English/History/Education courses, or otherwise) seem to work pretty well for these texts?