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2025 Course Schedule

(Syllabus Subject to Revision)
All gameplay times offered are estimates based on averages taken from howlongtobeat.com.

Week 1: Games and Play

September 29: “Introduction to Critical Videogame Studies” lecture

October 1: “How to do a video game close reading?” lecture. Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, play for 10 minutes), Passage (Jason Rohrer, 5 minutes), Passage mod (Mitu Khandaker, 5 minutes), Super Mario Bros. Level 1-1 (in class), and “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play” (Patrick Jagoda and Peter McDonald, p. 174-182)

October 3 (Section): Introductions and discussion of game close reading

Week 2: Power and Subjectivity

October 6: Braid (Jonathan Blow, 5-6 hours), “Artgames” in Works of Game (John Sharp, p. 49-76), and “Operational Logics and Playable Models” in How Pac-Man Eats (Noah Wardrip Fruin, p. 3-15)

October 8: Problem Attic (Liz Ryerson, play for 1 hour), Realistic Female First-Person Shooter (Anna Anthropy, 30 minutes), “The Other Side of Braid” (Liz Ryerson, online), and “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital” (Lisa Nakamura, 4 pages)

October 10 (Section): Extended discussion of “Power and Subjectivity” games and readings

Week 3: Uncertainty and Secrecy

October 13: Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 7 hours), Buckshot Roulette (30 minutes), and Uncertainty in Games (Greg Costikyan, p. 1-32)

October 15: Animal Well (Billy Basso as Shared Memory, 7-10 hours) and “Act Natural: From Therapeutic Role-Play to Super Mario World” (Peter McDonald)

October 17 (Section): Extended discussion of “Uncertainty and Secrecy” games and readings, and preparation for “Year of Games” symposium participation

October 17-19: Year of Games Symposium

Week 4: Control and Data

October 20: Replica (Somi, 1 hour), Telling Lies (Sam Barlow and Furious Bee, 4 hours), and “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (Henry Jenkins, online)

October 22: BioShock video, Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 8-9 hours), and “Origins of the First-Person Shooter” in Gaming (Alexander Galloway, p. 39-69)

October 24 (Section): Workshop midterm video essay arguments and scripts

Week 5: Agency and Choice

October 27: Reigns: Her Majesty (Nerial, play for an hour), The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, 2 hours), and “Games and the Art of Agency” (C. Thi Nguyen, p. 423–462)

October 29: Save the Date (Paper Dino Software, 30 minutes) and “What Games Can Learn from the Engagement Layers of Papers, Please” (Cory Johnson, online)

October 30: Night Trap game discussion between Ashlyn Sparrow and Chris Carloy

October 31 (Section): Meet at Regenstein Library Special Collections for a visit to the “Charting Imaginary Worlds: Why Fantasy and Games Are Inseparable” exhibition

October 31: Horror Games Special Session including Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games) and Mouthwashing (Wrong Organ)

October 31: MIDTERM “CRITICAL PLAY” VIDEO ESSAYS DUE

Week 6: Difficulty: Mechanical and Affective

November 3:  QWOP (Bennett Foddy, 2 minutes), Every Day the Same Dream (MolleIndustria – Paolo Pedercini, 15 minutes), and UFO 50 (play for 3 hours and at least 6 different games)

November 5: Little Inferno (3.5 hours) and “Difficulty” (Patrick Jagoda, p. 191-220)

November 7 (Section): Group work on collaborative Game Design Documents

Week 7: Failure and Redemption

November 10: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (Pippin Barr, play for 5-10 mins), Queers in Love at the End of the World (Anna Anthropy, 10 seconds), “Games to Fail With” in Playing with Feelings (Aubrey Anabel, p. 103-29), and “Introduction: Low Theory” in The Queer Art of Failure (Jack Halberstam, 1-26)

November 12: Pyre (Supergiant Games, 11 hours) and “Failure” (Patrick Jagoda, p. 221-250)

November 13: Machinima Screening (7pm)

November 14 (Section): Workshop final video essay abstracts

November 14: GROUP GAME DESIGN ASSIGNMENT DUE

Week 8: Labor and Neoliberalism

November 17: Do Not Feed the Monkeys (Fictiorama Studios, 4 hours), Cookie Clicker (Julien Thiennot, indefinite), and “Immaterial Labor: A Workers’ History of Videogaming” in Games of Empire (Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, p. 3-33)

November 18: ATS Play Session

November 19: American Truck Simulator (selection in MADD), “The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods” (Tom Welch, online), and “Play and Being: The Interplay of Existence in Death Stranding and Huizinga’s Homo Ludens” (Ashlyn Sparrow)

November 19: FINAL PROJECT SHORT ABSTRACT DUE

November 21 (Section): Workshop final video essay arguments and scripts

Week 9: Thanksgiving

November 24: Thanksgiving Break

November 26: Thanksgiving Break

Week 10: Countergaming

December 1: Borders (Gonzalo Alvarez, 30 minutes), We Become What We Behold (Nicky Case, 5 minutes), Phone Story (MolleIndustria – Paolo Pedercini, 15 minutes), “Gaming Literacy” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (Eric Zimmerman, p. 23-32), and “Our Princess Is in Another Castle: A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education” Review of Educational Research (M. Young et. al., p. 61-89).

December 3: Discussion of select Alternate Reality Games, Tabletop Roleplaying Games, and “A Psychologically ‘Embedded’ Approach to Designing Games for Prosocial Causes” (Geoff Kaufman and Mary Flanagan, p. 1-13)

Dec 8: FINAL “CRITICAL PLAY” VIDEO ESSAYS DUE

ASSIGNMENTS DESCRIPTION

Blog Posts (5) and Responses (Weekly)

Over the course of the quarter, you will contribute to a class blog through original posts and responses to your peers. These will consist of a mix of shared and custom topics.

  • 1 Post in response to a “Year of Games” Symposium (10/17-10/19) panel of your choice.
  • 1 Post on either the Night Trap panel (10/30) or the Machinima Screening (11/13)
  • 3 Posts on topics of your choice that relate to the games, readings, or discussions from any given week (see below for more details)

These posts are intended to influence and extend the conversations we have during our shared meetings, and to encourage your participation with unique on-campus events, which will be even more plentiful during the 2025-2026 Year of Games. You are required to post at least 5 entries over the course of the quarter. Each entry should respond to the specified event, that week’s games or theoretical readings, expand substantively on an ongoing topic of class discussion (without simply reproducing or documenting an exchange), or call our attention to articles or media about related phenomena. The 2 event-related entries should be posted within a week of the event. The other entries can be posted anytime over the course of the quarter and each of those posts must also comment on a topic from the week in which it is posted (so you can’t, for instance, return to a topic from Week 2 on Week 9 unless it is in some way related to a current discussion). While the content of these entries can be wide-ranging and less formal than your essays, you should observe formal citation standards and be mindful of your prose. You are also required to read posts by your classmates and respond briefly to at least one entry per week.

Midterm: “Critical Play” Video Essay (8 minutes)

For your midterm, you’ll perform an analysis of any video game that we have covered in class up to that point. As you explore your topic, you may turn to formal approaches as well as a cultural theory or philosophical methodology of your choice. The best analyses will combine elements including: 1.) medium-specific and formally-oriented reading practices, 2.) critical theories and methods such as historicism, feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, anthropological ethnography, genre theory, media theory, and/or another approach you’ve learned through your humanities or social science courses, and 3.) a clear definition of a concept that you are exploring and complicating.

Keep in mind that a persuasive analysis of different forms and media requires specific vocabularies and close reading practices proper to the work in question. For example, if you analyze a film, you must attend not only to plot or character development, but also to features such as shot distance, lighting, costume, mise-en-scène, cut type, sound effects, etc. When you think about a video game, on the other hand, you might consider elements including (but not limited to) aesthetic style, interface design, navigability, (non-)interactivity, game mechanics, platform affordances, networked dimensions, and so forth.

Instead of writing a paper, we are asking you to create a short video that includes your own verbal analysis combined with footage of gameplay that you are analyzing. You will receive additional instructions and resources for creating these essays. Samples of published versions of video essays, which analyze video games and film, include:

We are not expecting video essays of this quality but they can serve as models. Both essays grapple with sophisticated theoretical concepts and questions via close readings and media examples. You might also find it helpful to look at YouTube videos reviews of games that analyze their formal or thematic issues, such as:

Note that there are elements of these examples that are appropriate to your videos, but that these are not precise models. The level of analysis in your videos should be directed not toward a generalist audience (as these videos are) but toward an audience at least partially familiar with or interested in the kinds of game studies frameworks and analytical categories you’ve been studying in this course. Your video essay should introduce your game, include a close reading, develop an argument, and foreground implications (the “So what?” of your argument). In addition to footage from your primary game case, you can include footage of other games if they serve your argument.

Game Design Group Assignment (10+ pages in groups)

Collaboration is an increasingly vital skill in a cultural landscape dominated by digital technologies. While novels and poems are often written by individual authors, most videogames depend on partnerships among writers, artists, programmers, and designers.

For this short assignment, you will work with a group in your section in order to compose a short Game Design Document for a short video game that could someday be taught in “Critical Videogame Studies.” For this to work, the game needs to play with and speak back to your core themes. Here, we are looking for both formal innovation and conceptual depth. You are not actually developing this game, but we would like you to include the following elements:

  • Title: A compelling title
  • Elevator Pitch: A very short overview or “elevator pitch” of your project
  • Context: A description of how your game complicates or responds both to its genre parameters and key concepts or topics in meaningful ways. Think of this citationally. What are you drawing from and entering into conversation with? Are you drawing from other games? Readings from this or other courses? Critiques of games and media? Sociopolitical events? Personal experiences? Etc.
  • “So what?”: The things your project might teach the players. That is, what is the “So what?” of your game beyond entertainment or engagement? How does your game operate as theory-by-design? And why would we want to include it in a future version of this “Critical Videogame Studies” course?
  • Mechanics: Your core game “mechanic” and rules: What types of interactions does a player encounter?
  • Visual Style and/or Game Feel: The look and feel: What is the basic look and feel of the game? What is the visual style? You can include mood boards and art assets (more at the level of concept art), but those should go into an appendix beyond your 10+ pages.
  • Narrative: The narrative scenario or world: What is the story? What is the setting? What is the look and feel of the world? What is the premise, hook, or back story?
  • Target Audience: No game is created for a universal audience, so what kinds of players might find your game interesting or meaningful?
  • Future Research: The type of research, technical knowledge, and artistic skills that would be necessary to complete your work if you had additional time resources.

Your document should be at least 10 pages long (with reasonable margins and a 12-point font), but you can write longer if you get excited by the assignment. If you would like to use original or AI-generated images (which you should cite), you can absolutely do so! However, those images should be included in an Appendix that will not be included in the 10-page count.

Final: “Critical Play” Video Essay (15 minutes)

For your final assignment, you will build on lessons learned from your midterm and create an even more ambitious video essay. The formal principles are the same, but you should strive for an even more non-obvious argument and a substantive “So what?”

A few weeks prior to the due date, you will also submit a short 300-word abstract. We want everyone in the course to succeed, and this is an opportunity to receive feedback, so that you are on the right track moving into your final video essay.