Video games are one of the fastest growing sectors of the entertainment industry. However, videogames are having a cultural impact far beyond their role as an economic commodity; they are also changing the way we tell stories, the way we interact with one another, and the ways in which we understand the world and our own roles in it.

In this class, we explore all of these dynamics, studying the history of videogames, the present industry landscape, and possible future developments in technology, design, industry organization and the cultural role of games. The central question that serves as a guideline throughout the course is the extent to which, and what, how we play says something about society.

To provide students

- a broad sense of the history of video games as an art form, medium and an industry

- a sense of the social impact of video games

-the ability to critically analyze video games as a mediated space where designers, marketers, and players construct and contest gender, race and sexual norms.

- an understanding of the organization and culture of the video game industry

-an understanding of the politics and the economics of production processes, including collaborative/cooperative co-creation, intellectual property, specific to the gaming industry

-understand the relationships between game publishers and developers, controversies over authorship, ownership and compensation for creative work in the gaming industry

-an understanding of the major areas within video game research

Course Schedule Topics & Readings

nb. readings will be chosen among the following:

Week 1: Why Are Video Games Important? How can they be studied?

Chapter One of Course Text book: Understanding Video Games

Anthropy, A. (2012). “The Problem With Videogames” in Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, New York: Seven Stories Press.

Gee, J. P. (2007). “Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul” in Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy (pp. 7-12). New York: Peter Lang. 

Webber J.E and Griliopolous, D. (2017). “Why Games? Why Philosophy?” in Ten Things Videogames can Teach Us, Robinson.

Week 2: Video Games as a Cultural Industry

Chapter Two of Course Text book: Understanding Video Games

Adorno, T. W., & Rabinbach, A. G. (1975). Culture industry reconsidered. New German Critique, (6), 12-19.

Kerr, A. (2006). “Digital Games as Cultural Industry” in The Business and Culture of Video Games: Gamework/ Gameplay (pp. 43-74). London: SAGE.

Miller, T. (2008). “Anyone for Games? Via the New International Division of Cultural Labor”. in H. Anheier & Y. R. Isar (Eds.), The Cultural Economy (Vol. 2, pp. 227-240). London: SAGE. ESA (2012). 2011

“Sales , Demographic, and Usage Data: Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry” at: http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf

"The Business of Video Games" Forbes, April 2017:  https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinanderton/2017/04/29/the-business-of-video-games-a-multi-billion-dollar-industry-infographic/&refURL=https://www.google.fi/&referrer=https://www.google.fi/

Bartlett, E. (2000). "So You Want to be a Game Designer?" Accessed at http://www.igda.org/Endeavors/Articles/ebartlett_printable.html

Taylor, T.L. (2012). "Computer Games as Professional Sport" in Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. MIT Press.

Week 3: Cultural Commodities

Selections from: Dyer-Witheford, N. & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota

Bogost, I. (2013). "The Blue Shell is Everything That's Wrong With America" in How to Talk About Video Games (pp. 10-21). University of Minnesota Press.

Taylor, T.L. (2012). "Professionalizing Players" in Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. MIT Press.

Watch: "The Celebrity Millionaires of Competitive Gaming". Vice. (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of1k5AwiNxI

Week 4: Identity I – Textual Analysis

Subrahmanyam, K., & Greenfield, P. M. (1999). “Computer Games for Girls: What Makes Them Play”. In J. Cassell & H. Jenkins (Eds.), From Barbi to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (pp. 46-71). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sommerfeldt, C. (2005). “The Embodied Adventurer”. In N. Garrelts (Ed.), Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer (pp. 160-173). Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Carr, D. (2002). “Playing with Lara”. In G. King & T. Krzywinska (Eds.), Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (pp. 171-180). New York: Wildflower Press.

Miller, Kiri. "Gaming the system: Gender performance in Dance Central." New media & Society 17.6 (2015): 939-957.

Nakamura, Lisa “Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel Optimism." https://lnakamur.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/racism-sexism-and-gamings-cruel-optimism.pdf

Week 5: Identity II – Reception and Ethnographies

Ritsema, J. & Thakore, B. K. (2012). “Sincere Fictions of Whiteness in Virtual Worlds: How Fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Games Perpetuate Color-blind, White Supremacist Ideology”. in D. G. Embrick, J. T. Wright, and A. Lukacs (eds) Social Exclusion, Power, and Video Game Play. New York: Lexington Books. pp 141-54.

Blackmon, S., & Terrell, D. J. (2009). “Racing towards Representation: An Understanding of Racial Representation in Video Games”. In C. L. Selfe & G. E. Hawisher (Eds.), Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 203-216). New York: Palgrave McMillan.

Alexander, J. with McCoy, M. & Velez, C. (2007). “A Real Effect on the Gameplay: Computer Gaming, Sexuality, and Literacy” In C. L. Selfe & G. E. Hawisher (Eds.), Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 203-216). New York: Palgrave McMillan. 

Week 6: When Play Gets Serious: AI, Augmented Reality and VR

Chapter Eight of Course Text book: Understanding Video Games

Frasca, G. (2003). “Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology”. In Wolf, M. J. P & Excerpts from: Perron, B. (eds.) (2003). The Video Game Theory Reader &

Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palmgrave Macmillan. 

Watch: Episode 4 Series 3 Black Mirror, San Junipero; Episode 1 Series 4 Black Mirror, USS Callister

Week 7: Video Games as Medium

Chapter Three of Course Text book: Understanding Video Games

Fuller, Matthew (2003). “Behind the Blip Software as Culture” in Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Autonomedia: Brooklyn, NY; pp 11-37.

Newman, James (2004). “What Is A Videogame? Rules, Puzzles and Simulations” Videogames. Routledge: New York; pp. 9-28.

Southern, M . (2001). The Cultural Study of Games: More Than Just Games, from http://www.igda.org/Endeavors/ Articles/msouthern_printable.html

Hennessey, J. and McGowan J. (2017. "Totally Tubular" in The Comic Book Story of Video Games (pp1-23). Ten Speed Press.

Week 8: The Question of Play

Ruggill, J. (2007). “I’m Here Because I’m Bored”: Getting at the Nature of Ludic Computation from In Media Res. Accessed at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2007/10/30/i%E2%80%99m-here-because-i %E2%80%99m-bored-getting-at-the-nature-of- ludic- computation

Bogost, I. (2013). "A Portrait of the Artist as a Game Studio" in How to Talk About Video Games (pp. 10-21). University of Minnesota Press.

Goldberg, H. (2011). “The Future” from All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Hendricks, T. S. (2006). “Johan Huizinga’s Challenge to Play Studies” in Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 1-26.

Kress, Gunther and Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996). “Representation and Interaction: Designing the Position of the Viewer” in Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge: London; pp. 119-158.

Week 9: Social Gaming - Video Games as Mass Media & Communication Technologies

Benjamin, W. (2001).” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (pp. 48-70). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Wolf, M. J. P. (2001). “The Video Game as a Medium”. In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), The Medium of the Video Game (pp. 13-34). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Week 10: Labor, Creative Work and Exploitation plus student presentations

Excerpts from: Dyer-Witheford, N. (2015). Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital  Vortex. Pluto Press.

Week 11: Games, Drones and the Military Imagination: Effects and Violence

Miller, T. “The Shameful Trinity: Game Studies, Empire and the Cognitariat”

Navarro, V. “I Am a Gun: The Avatar and Avatarness in the FPS”

Call, J. “Bigger, Better, Stronger, Faster: Disposable Bodies and Cyborg Construction”

(all in Voorhees, G. et al. (Eds.), Guns, Grenades and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012))

Persky, S. & Blackovich, J. (2007). “Immersive Virtual Environments Versus Traditional Platforms: Effects of Violent and Nonviolent Video Game Play” in Media Psychology 10 (1), pp. 135-56.

Nieborg, D. B. (2009). “Training Recruits and Conditioning Youth: the Soft Power of Military Games”. In N. Huntermann & M. T. Payne (Eds.), Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (pp. 53-66). New York: Routledge.

Week 12: History of Video Games/Video Games as History

Chapter Four of Course Text book: Understanding Video Games

Ito, M. (2008). “Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children's Software”. In K. Salen (Ed.), The Ecolology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning (pp. 89-114). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fullerton, T. (2008). “Documentary Games: Putting the Player in the Path of History”. In Z. Whalen & L. N. Taylor (Eds.), Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (pp. 215-238). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Crogan, P. (2008). “Wargaming and Computer Games: Fun with the Future”. In M. Swalwell & J. Wilson (Eds.), The Pleasures of Computer Gaming (pp. 147-166). Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

Week 13: Storytelling & Narrative in Games

Fullerton, T. (2008). “The Game Design Document” in T. Fullerton, C. Swain, S. Hoffman Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Jenkins, H. (2006). “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 670-689). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Journet, D. (2007). “Narrative, Action, and Learning: the Stories of Myst”. In C. L. Selfe & G. E. Hawisher (Eds.), Gaming Lives in the Twenty First Century (pp. 93-120). New York: Palgrave McMillan.

Week 14: Gamer Theory

Wark, M. (2007). Gamer Theory. Harvard