This course will offer students the opportunity to explore games of all sorts to better understand how they are constructed, what kinds of stories they tell, how we learn while playing, and – perhaps most importantly – what makes them so much fun. To do this, we’ll develop some tools for analyzing the mechanics of board games, table-top role playing games like D&D, and video games. We’ll explore and write about the experience of learning and playing games, dip into writing in the communities surrounding those games, and construct projects that relate to connections between games and your other interests.

Depending on your personal goals, the final project in this course will offer you different things as readers and writers. Everyone will read a variety of games like writers to better understand how they work. After that, things will get personal. Some will use that understanding to design their own games and supporting materials. Some will construct a range of public-facing texts that you might find in gaming communities. Others will write cultural critiques of games. Still others will develop plans to use the innate learning potential in games to think about authentic implications for teaching. And maybe some will come up with quite different kinds of projects. Everyone will be expected to play, analyze, write about, and enjoy the intellectual depth of games and their surrounding communities.