ENGL 350C Critical Game Studies
Over the past forty years, videogames have become a dominant form of global cultural production. Individual titles now gross billions of dollars and smartphones have made casual gaming nearly ubiquitous. Videogames inform a variety of other arenas as well, including business, education, health, social media, and the military. And yet many still do not consider videogames worthy of significant attention. The emergence of serious independent videogames over the past fifteen years, however, alongside a renaissance in the academic field of game studies have firmly established the videogame as an important object of humanistic inquiry. This course will introduce students to the field of critical game studies. We will play a variety of games and learn how to engage critically these unique media objects. The course will also provide historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts for the study of videogames, and explore a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches for critically playing and analyzing them. We will think about why we should study videogames, read theoretical reflections on medium specificity and the nature of play, think about issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in games and gaming culture, and explore the relationship between videogames and the political and economic realities of the early-twenty-first century. As videogames become one of the more visible and important forms of cultural production, it has become essential to develop a gamic literacy and a critical vocabulary for understanding how and why they make meaning, how and why they are such a powerful force in the media landscape of contemporaneity.