January 3, 2008 Archives

Feel free to post your questions here, or on any other page on the site.

Posting a comment here (or anywhere on the course blog) will automatically generate an e-mail, so you don't need to e-mail me to tell me that you left a comment.

If you'd like to arrange a telephone conversation, or if you happen to be on campus and you'd like to visit, my website has my contact information.

What are you hoping to get out of this course? After you have examined today's assigned texts and looked at the course outline, what are your initial impressions?

(Because the blogs were down for part of the day, I've posted today's discussion questions on the J-Web forum.)

The course website is located at http://jerz.setonhill.edu/teaching/EL250. The site will develop as the course progresses. I'll never move a deadline up, but I may assign additional readings or change assignments around a bit.

The course will begin with a few slide shows and handouts that I've worked up in order to get things going, but we will quickly move into a phase where most of our time will be spent responding to the assigned readings -- I won't keep creating slide shows that spell in bulleted lists out every little detail for you. Instead, we will work out the important things together, through online discussion (and I'm sure I'll learn as much as everyone else in the class).

• I plan to post an announcement every day at about 4pm EST, and that's where you'll find a list of what you should be working on next.
• The page you will want to consult most frequently is the outline (which lists all assigned readings and the due dates for major assignments).
• During the last week or so, most of the assignments will be geared towards helping you make progress on your term paper.

The most important thing to note is that I'll make that 4pm update with the optimistic assumption that you have completed all the assigned work for that day. Some of the next day's work will actually be due at 9:AM, so that I have time to read and respond to it, and incorporate your progress into my daily 4PM announcement.

Feel free to post questions on the site -- I'll be happy to clarify whenever I can. I'm working on an updated blogging tutorial, but if you're dying to get started, here's a link to the existing weblog tutorial.

You can also contact me privately, if you don't wish to make your comment public.

If you e-mail me a good question, I might strip your name from it and post a public response, with the idea that others in the class who haven't thought of asking that question would nevertheless benefit from the answer. If you'd prefer a private response, then let me know.

The reviews you see in gamer magazines are like the film reviews you see on TV. The author is trying to help you decide whether you should spend your money on this title, knowing that your decision will be based almost entirely on whether you will "enjoy" the experience. New games journalism describes the work of authors who are writing not simply in order to help consumers spend their money.

A slide show with audio. I am attempting to post a version with audio narration, but at the moment the file is huge (over a gigabyte!) so I need to figure out how to compress it. (I will have something in some useful format by noon, Jan 03.)

At the moment, the Power Point file, without recorded narration but with the notes that I was reading from, is available in the Handouts section of J-Web.

After you've watched/listened to/read the lecture, post a response here -- a request for clarification, an objection, a link to some other related material, or anything else that demonstrates your willingness to engage intellectually with the material.

Update:

A Windows movie file (slides and audio) (AVI, 67 Meg) Opening Lecture.avi

MP3 Audio (37 Meg): Opening Lecture.mp3

We'll spend some this week developing our definitions of these:

• Genre
• Video Game
• Game
• Culture
• Theory
• Fun

What do we mean by "culture," "theory," and "video game"?  How does the work we will do in this course differ from what you might expect to find in a walkthrough written by a fan, a review written by a journalist, or a market study written by a game developer? How do scholars look at the subjects they study, and how does the study of video games fit into the context of a liberal arts education? How will this class work?