Culture: October 2007 Archive Page

Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I'm planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I'm sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about the course that are likely to remain essentially the same. Video Game Culture and Theory: Course Objectives (2006)

Your objectives for this course are to

• explore definitions of important concepts such as game and fun
• learn about the origins and historical development of video games,
• expose yourself to a broad range of games,
• gain experience recognizing and interpreting basic game elements (goal, risk, fiction, emotional engagement, rules, outcome, values, consequences, close playing, etc.),
• develop an awareness of the complex cultural context within which games exist (children's culture, geek culture, women's issues, political issues, economic issues, aesthetic issues, etc.),
• and ultimately, to discern the core cultural values represented in a particular game.

To that end, you will:

• play several games on the syllabus, read three books and additional shorter articles as assigned,
• complete quizzes and exercises to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and to evaluate your progress,
• participate regularly in classroom and web-based discussions, and
• write a formal research paper (minimum 10 pages).

Neither ability to "win" a game nor programming/design talents are germane to the subject of this course. At the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Demonstrate competence in the critical reading of complex cultural texts (including games, cultural responses to games, and the academic study of games)
2. Engage intellectually and respectfully with your peers (in person and online)
3. Write a college-level paper that appropriately uses primary and secondary sources to defend a non-obvious claim (without minimizing or neglecting opposing or alternative views)

Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com.

Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson reviews the new Charles "Peanuts" Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

From the New Yorker:

It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo's time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid--our word "galaxy" comes from the Greek for milk--and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.

The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow." Anyone who has flown across the country on a clear night has seen the landscape ablaze with artificial lights, especially in urban areas. Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope.