Today’s Plan:
- Procedural Feedback
- Tragedy Gaming Journals
- Homework
Procedural Feedback
I’ve got a document that I want to share.
Also, we’ve got another “quiz” (not a quiz) in Canvas.
Tragedy Gaming Journals
I’ve done some work to distill our intellectual meanderings on tragedy into a (hopefully) more useful heuristic. Let’s take a look.
Homework
From my email:
Your homework in preparation for Thursday is to start playing your game for this project and to write a journal entry. Your journal entry should be focusing on the ideas we covered in class last week, and so I’d like you to try and craft a paragraph or two that makes a connection between Curran’s explication of catharsis and your game. Hence why I’m writing you now–so you have a bit of time to play your game for at least 45-60 minutes and then write about it for 15-30 minutes (which, hey, is the *exact* amount of time that Tuesday’s class would take). If you are selecting a longer game, then you should probably double the play time (and count that as additional homework for Thursday).
Now it is time to knock out another major chunk of your game. Your homework this weekend is to play for at least 2 hours [so, our running total is 3 hours thus far]. Then spend 30 minutes writing.
Your writing should take one of the questions/terms from the heuristic and apply it to your play thus far. Perhaps you have identified a kind of repetition. Perhaps you can see how the game is attempting to manipulate your emotions. Perhaps you are already afraid/concerned for what the game might make you do. Perhaps you have no emotional attachment to the protagonist (the game has failed to forge identification, and/or/thus failed to produce complicity).
This is the tricky part of the project–since I cannot predict how you will respond to your game. I cannot predict if you will have some kind of epiphany, some moment of inspiration or insight. A spark. A flash. Thought can be a cunning foe and/or a cruel ally.
