Module: MCO6103-20 Videogames

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor: James Newman

Module Tutor Contact Details: J.Newman@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module:

MCO6103-20 Videogames is a module about videogames. More surprisingly, we will spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of the module trying to work out what we mean by the term ‘videogames’, how we can study and write about them, how we encounter them as media students, media consumers and players, and what phrases like ‘interactive fiction’ and ’the gamification of culture’ could possibly mean.

We’ll look at the field of ‘game studies’ and work through some key issues including ‘interactive’ and ‘ergodic’ structures, player-character-gameworld relationships, ludo-narrative dissonance, configurative performance and performativity, and representations both within and surrounding computer and videogame products. In covering a range of approaches, the module will encourage you to scrutinise videogames via the concepts of play, audience and fandom, as well as considering them as products of an increasingly formalised, transmedial and global industry.

You will engage with a variety of sources including academic game studies, mainstream and specialist press, and the critiques and commentaries of industry and practitioner communities. The summative assessment encourages you to investigate the ways in which games are written about and discussed in a variety of different publications/for different audiences; and develop strategies for capturing, documenting and preserving games and gameplay for public exhibition and future scholarly access.

2. Outline syllabus:

The module is split into two key blocks.

The first is based around popular forms of writing about games and encourages you to think about the kinds of themes and issues raised by and within games and gaming culture as well as the language and terminology that we use to describe games and play.

The second encourages you to think about videogames both as cultural objects and as complex digital - and material - objects. By considering the kinds of business, technology and advertising practices that dominate in the video game industries, we will explore ways of preserving and archiving games in museum and gallery settings. In this way, the module introduces you to contemporary debates in game studies and key concepts in digital media preservation.

3. Teaching and learning activities:

In addition to the formal lecture and seminar programme, the module aims to provide opportunities to draw upon and critique your personal experiences of computer and videogames; explore the industry and its products; encourage first-hand participation and engagement with the object of study so as to further the application of critical theoretical perspectives; equip you with an empirical grounding often lacking in extant approaches to the study of computer and videogames; and enable you write critically about videogames for different audiences. As such, the module schedule includes times dedicated to gameplay performance and screenings of streamed/captured performance/commentated play.

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Object History File (5000 words equivalent)

• % Weighting: 100