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Roughly the first third (Preface to Chapter 4)

This exercise is a quick check to make sure you have the research skills that will be necessary to do well on your term paper. If you've taken STW, then this will be a simple review.

A habit you may have learned in high school is to write a full draft of a paper that supports the point that you want to make, and then "finding quotes" from scholarly sources that agree with your position. But that defeats the purpose of writing a research paper... you're supposed to learn as you research... maybe you'll even change your mind, based on the information and argument you encounter. So, before I ask you to come up with a thesis for your research paper, I'm going to ask you to show me that you know how to find and read academic articles.

1. Find a peer-reviewed academic article on a topic of video game studies that closely interests you.  Some online journals include Game Studies, Kairos, and Games and Culture, but you will also find articles about games in many other journals. (I found 278 hits for peer-reviewed, full-text articles containing the words "video game" in the EBSCOhost database at Reeves Library... there are far fewer when I search for specific games, but as you'll see, it's OK if you can't find any articles written about the game you want to study. Supply a full MLA-style reference for the article.
2. Quote the author's main thesis. (That is, what is the single main claim that this author makes?)
3. What evidence does the author use in order to support the main idea? Please don't go through my list and answer "yes" or "no" for each pf the following suggestions... my goal is to get you to think about what evidence the authors are offering.
• Has the author conducted a scientific experiment, putting 50 kids in a room with video games and 50 kids in a room with TV, and then counted how many fights broke out?
  
• Did the author merely ask the parents of the kids to answer a survey about the level of aggression the kids showed?
  
• Did the author show 20 girls games about war and 20 boys games about make-up, and then interview the kids afterwards to see what they thought? 
  
• Did the author spend 6 months playing the game as a guild with other researchers, in oder to gain first-hand evidence?
  
• Is the author quoting from scholarly works, published reviews, interviews with gamers, Congressional testimony, or dialogue contained in the games?
  
4. What alternative or opposing ideas does the author reject (in order to build up support for the main idea)?
5. What are the sources for the author's presentation of evidence that works against the author's thesis?
   
6. How does an academic article differ from 6A) a traditional game review, and 6B) New Games Journalism?
   

Last week I first introduced you to an early paper by Jesper Juul in which the author challenged the centrality of fiction in the study of games. I then asked you to read a book in which Juul said games are both fiction and rules.  Last week, I introduced you to Espen Aarseth's term "ergodic." Now I'm asking you to look at this article, which challenges a central tenet of game studies -- that what matters is games is the playing. Newman seems to have a good concept of how games can be significant to a group of people, even when only one is playing at a time. He makes a clear argument -- and this is why I've chosen this article, so that you can see how scholars in any developing field advance the boundaries of their understanding by disagreeing with each other -- by saying, "Sure, your idea works for the examples you chose, but what about *this* case?" http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/ 

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players - "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles. The pleasure of videogame play does not simply flow through the lead of a joystick.

Juul, Half-Real