In today’s class I want your groups to produce a project proposal. The following should be a google doc that is shared with me. The proposal should include the following elements:
- Group Names
- Project Description: medium, a 2-3 sentence summation of your aims. What is your research question (and, if you can’t frame your goals in terms of an open-ended question, then we might have a problem).
- Methodology for selecting games to be included in your study. You should point to the methodologies of another study if possible.
- A tentative list of games that this methodology has produced.
- Methodology for analyzing games. Give me a description of what you will look at/for, whether you will play the games, how you will collate your data. Your methodological discussion should point to other articles/studies. At this time, you should include a list of things you have read or will read to help validate your findings. In the final project, I will ask for you to justify why you looked for what you looked for–are your results valid?
- A hypothesis: what are you expecting to find?
- A project time chart, outlining goals, due dates, etc. I will ask each group member to keep a log that charts the hours they have invested on the project in this document starting today until you turn it in. The log should be the last section of the document. I have attached a sample proposal and log that you can copy/paste.
In terms of playing the games, I expect each of you to invest about 4-5 hours a week into this project for the next few weeks (this is due the Thursday of week 8, so that’s a total of 12-15 hours of work). So, while I understand that you can’t play every game in the study, I expect you to play some games.
Also, there’s an approximation for how much time you will spend researching and writing about the games you don’t play. If all you are doing is looking at character models, then this might take 10 minutes a game. I would expect, then, that each person would look at 25 games or so. A group of 4 would look at 100 games.
If, beyond appearance, you delve into the script to look at dialogue, then that will take more time. How long is difficult to estimate. This is something I will take into account during final grading.
