Today’s Plan:
- Review
- “Mechanics”
- For Next Session (and Beyond)
Review
I talked about “procedural rhetoric” a bit-arguing that it is an approach to video games that thinks about how the non-symbolic (word/image) dimensions of a game tells us something, or tries to persuade us about, an element of the world and/or our existence in it.
We watched James play a bit of “Everyday the Same Dream” and conducted some close reading–trying to connect specific elements, decisions, moments, in the game to a theory of what that game’s themes might be, its purpose, what it wants us to think or do differently.
Discussion: What Are Mechanics?
Words will happen. I’m guessing we have 15 minutes here.
Marc, remember to discuss “serious” games. This is worth a bit of our time (say 10 minutes).
And then maybe we play this for 8 minutes or so. And talk about it for another 10.
For Next Session (and Beyond)
(10 minutes to discuss homework)
On Friday, we will be meeting in the Ross 1240 computer lab. It is downstairs, in the same hallway as the Writing Center. We’ll be “speed playing” a few different games in preparation for our first project.
Remember that the homework for Friday is to finish reading the Bogost article and complete the Canvas assignment.
Speaking of our first project, I’d like to talk about it a bit today since we do not have class on Monday. Your homework over the long break is to play a video game for two hours in order to construct a procedural analysis of it. Hopefully, after today’s discussion, you have a bit better of a sense of what you might explore (and, if things go as I hope, we’ll have revised the quick template I used for this project last year, the template that we will use for speed playing on Friday).
I have a list of games that people have played for this first project the last few years. Pick one! If you would like to play a game for our first project that *isn’t* on the list, that’s okay too. We should probably talk about it in office hours Thursday if you can make it–I just want to make sure that the game does something procedural / mechanically interesting.
The homework over the weekend will be to play whatever game you have chosen for at least 2 hours and have something interesting to say about it.
