Video Games and Meaning

A new course taught by Alyse Knorr at Regis University

Alyse has kindly shared the proposal for Video Games and Meaning. If you don’t happen to attend Regis in Colorado, you might also find her teaching online for Hugo House. See our conversation for more on Alyse’s work.

Integrative Core Course Proposal  

Our students are living lives within and surrounded by video games. They play them on their phones, on their laptops, and in their dorm rooms. They organize Mario Kart tournaments and connect with friends back home over Xbox Live. They build and play as characters with complicated skill sets, racial identities, and even marriage and families. 72% of men and 49% of women aged 18 to 29 play video games, which are without a doubt the newest, most popular, and most profitable form of art and entertainment. The question at the heart of this course is: why? Why do so many humans love games (broadly) and video games (specifically)? And what kind of meaning—artistic, experiential, even spiritual—do we make out of this form of interactive media? 

Through the lenses of art, narratology, ludic studies, business, communication, queer studies, and disability studies, this class will examine the history and impact of video games on American culture. We will consider video games as works of art, as immersive experiences, as educational tools, and as products for profit. We will analyze the political/social arguments that games make implicitly and explicitly, as well as how auteur game designers express their personal experiences in the games they create. We will explore how organizational psychologists are finding ways to “gamify” life and work to make them more enjoyable, and how the idea of “failure” is so essential to both game design and life. Finally, we will consider controversies associated with video games such as video games and violence, gaming addiction, racism and sexism in games and the gaming community, and the ethics of the games industry.  

To unpack these questions, students will play games from a wide variety of genres (storytelling games, platformers, sandbox, strategy, role-playing, puzzlers, and first-person shooter) by a wide variety of designer identities (see potential game list below). Students will also read accompanying popular and academic texts or watch accompanying documentaries, then discuss their gaming experiences with the community. We will take excursions (more below) to explore the ways that gaming communities exist in both virtual and physical space. 

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

• SLO 1: Identify and analyze some of the reasons why many people love playing video games, and some of the ways that players make meaning out of games
• SLO 2: Discuss (in oral and written forms) games in terms of narratology, ludic studies, business, and communication theory, using academic and popular sources as well as their own experiences;
• SLO 3: Research, discuss, and debate diverse perspectives on key questions and controversies related to video games, synthesizing other’s viewpoints with one’s own. Construct well-supported and sustained critical arguments about these debates, justified by evidence. 
• SLO 4: Formulate their own creative, sci-fi-themed responses to justice issues and share these with their community. 

The primary form of homework for this class will be playing games! I will ensure that everyone has easy access to the assigned (free or very very cheap) games on their own personal devices or through the library—this is easier to do than you’d think. In addition to playing games as primary texts, students will also read articles and watch documentaries related to the course content. 

Because the nature of the course is to uncover how individuals make meaning out of games, one major assignment will be a presentation on a game of each student’s choice. They can present about the history, theory, and personal impact of a game that has meant a lot to them, and if they have never played video games before this class, then they can present on a non-digital game (Monopoly, tag, chess, etc.) instead. 

The culminating assignment for this class will be for students to design their own game that focuses on themes, questions, gameplay styles, or topics that fascinate them. Students will be able to choose between either literally building their game using free and simple online tools or, if what they envision is beyond the scope of these tools, then they can pitch an idea for a game including its premise, graphics style, and plot, and design the “box art” of the game with a logo. Accompanying this final assignment will be a presentation and a short reflective essay in which students connect their design choices with key texts and ideas from the course. 

I would also love to take students on an excursion to an arcade and/or a game store during this class, where we could play arcade games and experience gaming in community together. We could also attend (either virtually or in-person) an eSports competition. Finally, we could attend either the Denver Indie Games Expo (November) or the Colorado Video Games BBQ (April), both of which are exciting expos with presentations, games on display, and game designers to talk with. 

 Potential games to assign: 

• “Hair Nah”: a game by a Black woman designer that comments on the ways that white people try to inappropriately touch her hair in public places
• “Papers Please”: a game commenting on immigration policies that puts players in the role of immigration authority at the border
• “Gone Home”: a game about queerness and coming out, and the fragility of families 
• “Passage”: a game about life, death, aging, and making meaning out of it all  
• “Oregon Trail”: an educational game that many of us grew up with that implicitly validated messages of Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans
• “Queers in Love at the End of the World” and “Dys4ia”: games by trans designer Anna Anthropy that seek to put players into the experience of coming out as trans 
• “This War of Mine”: a survival-based game that explores the civilian experience of war 
• “Superhot”: a first-person shooter that makes players question the nature of their reality, Matrix-style