July 2015 Bookclub

If you haven't already guessed, the July book is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

First of all, we'd like to recognize the online Level Up Book Club, who read this book in October 2012. We would suggest to anyone interested in a great game/education reading list and a great example ofan online book club to visit their site.

Why are we doing Ready Player One?

We enjoyed doing young adult fiction last summer and this book is the ultimate example of the metagame.The characters in the book are participating in a world wide hunt to find the three keys and win control of a virtual world/game called Oasis and all the assets of the company that owns the virtual world. The book is about a game within a game and to win the game you have to study the metagame of the game designer. Here's Week 1, so you can take a look.

To make this even more fun, we'll also have the two tracks branching off from Ready Player One.

For the first track, we'll be looking at the game Ingress.

The second track is inspired by something Jon Spike told us about on the Interactive Fiction Google Hangouts. He mentioned that he was starting a dystopian arcade with one of his classes.

Pairing the book Ready Player One to a couple of dystopian games per week seemed to be a great fit.

Live Events

For the Metagame Book Club, we combine synchronous sessions with discussion on our Google + community. No synchronous participation is required but we would certainly enjoy you joining us.

We record all sessions over Google Hangout and they are available at the Games MOOC YouTube Channel.

Mon Jul 20    9 am ET                        Introduction to the Book Club and Ready Player One (8 mins)

Wed Jul 22    9 pm ET                        Overview of Ingress with Cynthia Clark

Sat   Jul 25    10 am ET                       Week 1 Hangout  - Ready Player One p. 1 - 166

Mon Jul 27    9 am ET                        Week 2 Overview (11 mins.)

Sat  Aug  1    10 am ET                       Week 2 Hangout  - Ready Player One p. 166 - 266

Mon Aug 3    9 am ET                        Week 2 Overview (15 mins.)

Sat  Aug  8    10 am ET                       Week 3 Hangout  - Ready Player One p. 267 - 372

Wed Aug 12   8 pm ET                       Closing Session with Dr. Cynthia Calongne (Lyr Lobo)