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Lehrende/r: Dr. Damien Schlarb
Veranstaltungsart:
Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
05.866.410
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Credits:
8,0
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 30
Anmeldegruppe: AS 410
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.
Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
You should be familiar with
- American Culture as it is covered in both Culture Studies I & II
- Academic argumentative writing (Written English I & II)
You do not have to be an avid gamer to participate. Like with every new class, you will be expected to engage critically with the theories and objects we cover and develop your own research project.
Active Participation
- weekly online discussion forum responses
- a response paper
- final paper proposal (for paper writers)
Credit Requirement
- final argumentative research paper
You will be required to come up with your own aper projects absed on the course readings and discussions.
All requirements are subject to change. Please see the syllabus on the first day of classes.
Anwesenheitspflicht:
Regular attendance is expected. If you are not in class, you are missing out on opportunities to ask questions and to hone the skills necessary for completing the credit requirements for this course. Whether you come to class or not, it will be your responsibility to keep up with readings and class assignments and turn in all required assignments as directed. There will be no make-up work.
Inhalt:
This seminar explores the connections between American Culture(s) and digital games (als “video games” or “computer games”). The course provides a methodological and theoretical introduction to Digital Game Studies as well as a condensed primer on American Cultural Studies. We will discuss how games speak to familiar theoretical concepts such as race, class, gender, economics, ecology and to different analytical foci like ideology. In doing so, we will be interested in how games create and speak back to culture. Video games have become a global medium capable of producing and commenting on what we call culture. And yet, games figure as strange and complex objects of study. Critically discussing games therefore requires that we adapt our methodologies that we deploy in analyzing novels, movies, or TV shows. Traditional “analog” games, such as board games, are built of rules and conditions, yet video games often come wrapped in narratives that sometimes even span various media (e.g. Fortnite, The Matrix). Video games engage players and incorporate them into their digital story worlds and, in doing so, make visible certain dimensions of human behavior: immersion, motivation, focus, flow, engagement, fun, play, but also mental manipulation and addiction. Their ability to modulate all other legacy media (print, radio, TV) allows them to reflect meta-referentially on the nature of media as such (e.g. The Stanley Parable). They also reveal the inner workings of the rising digital technology economy as well as the political economy of technology (#gamification). These factors make video games worthwhile objects of scholarly inquiry, and they will inform our semester-long discussion on whether and how games speak to us as cultural objects.
I will assume that none of you have worked with games in a scholarly academic setting before. We will start by asking simple questions: How do we talk about games? How do we analyze them? Answering these questions will require us to consider games alternatingly as texts, digital, procedurally generated objects, activities, or code. This kind of flexibility constitutes one of the challenges of studying this fascinating medium. We will then talk about games in a Culture Studies setting, review existing taxonomies and genre categories, and deliberate how games continue and challenge the U.S.-American cultural and media traditions. How do games speak to (American) culture? How do they generate meaning? Talking about games as cultural objects will allow us to draw on some of the Cultural Studies theories you already know from other seminars. For example, we may ask how gender is negotiated in certain genres, such as role playing or online shooter games, and discuss if and how that negotiation differs from other, older media forms.
Empfohlene Literatur:
All readings for the course will be available as e-books, courtesy of the JGU University Library. You need an active JGU account and a VPN to access these materials from home.
Some of the best introductions are listed below. They are all available as e-texts via the UB to familiarize yourself with video games as a matter of academic inquiry, which I strongly recommend, esp. if you never worked with games before. Other texts will be announced on day 1.
- Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2015.
- Fernandez-Vara. Introduction to Game Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Digitale Lehre:
This seminar will be conducted on campus and in person. No digital or hybrid formats are planned at the moment. Please monitor your email inbox for updates.
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