jim ridolfo

In the last five years there has been an increased interest in the design of video games as a form of argument, particularly in terms of social justice. In this class we will study several recent video games designed to make an argument. These include titles such as Peacemaker (2006), a game focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that says its purpose is to challenge the player to experience and bring “peace to the Middle East or [experience] the agony of plunging the region into disaster,” and Food Force, a video game where a player assumes the role of a United Nations World Food Program (WFP) officer and must facilitate a rescue operation.

Key Questions

We will investigate five critical questions as a class: how can video games function as a form of persuasion? How do the narratives of video games work as an argument? How do these examples work differently from written forms of the argument? How are video games used to persuade and recruit? Is there the potential for a dark side to these examples?

Readings

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. New York: MIT P, 2007.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. New York: Starscape, 2002.

Gee, James Paul. Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy. Grand Rapids: Peter Lang, Incorporated, 2007.

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Warschauer, Mark. Electronic Literacies : Language, Culture, and Power in Online Education. Danbury: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Incorporated, 1998.

Sheridan, David T., and William Hart-Davidson. “Just for fun: Writing and literacy learning as forms of play.” Computers and Composition (2008).

Additional rhetoric readings…..

Conceptual Pairings

Peacemaker / Newspaper articles / Readings on Israel Palestine

UN WFP / Educational readings / Influence of the game

Ender’s Game / America’s Army

Guest Speakers

Skype: Bill Hart-Davidson and David Sheridan: Ink

Skype: Designing Video Games for Social Justice

Skype: Someone from Peacemaker… Janice Fernheimer?

Assignments

Analysis: Analyze one of the four games we have looked at in class. How does the structure of the games advance a specific argument? How does the game shape the user experience around the argument? 20%

Propose: Propose a game concept as an argument. This will be informed by the Bogost and Sheridan/Hart-Davidson readings. 20%

Design: Using storyboard software (Storyboard Pro), create a storyboard mockup of your game design. 30%

Other: Short homework assignments 20%, Article/Book presentation 10%.