Game-Related Courses for the Fall Term

Are you picking out electives for the Fall and want to take a course related to video game studies? We've accumulated a list here to get you started.

AMCULT 204 - U.S. Culture and Digital Games (Fall 2018)
The video game industry now covers multiple sectors and generates more revenue than the movie and music industry. This course will examine the history, culture, and practice of video games in the U.S through critical readings, gameplay, and discussion.

COMPLIT 100 - Zombies! (Fall 2018)
This course surveys the expansive textual universe that has been bitten by zombies, from literature, graphic novels, movies, and video games to political theory and urgent public policy debates. Major issues to be discussed include individual versus collective freedoms, personal identity, group behavior, ideology, and the uses of propaganda.
Course professor: Benjamin Paloff

EDUC 333 - Video Games and Learning (Fall 2018)
Why are videogames fun? The answer isn't as obvious as you might think. Good games draw you in, teach you how to succeed, and keep you engaged with a "just right" level of challenge. Most importantly, players *learn* while playing a well-designed game. Why isn't school like that? This class takes a hard look at videogames, a hard look at education, and considers ways that each can be improved to maximize learning.

EDUC/MENAS 462 - Web Based Mentorship: Place Out of Time (Fall 2018)
This seminar revolves around Place Out Of Time (POOT), a web-based character-playing simulation involving college, high school, and middle school students. You will have a dual role in the simulation: you will play a character yourself, and you will also act as a project leader and mentor to the younger participants. The idea is to help the students to construct a bridge between historical times and the present day, to gain a heightened appreciation for other worldviews, and to wrestle with some (hopefully) interesting questions in a way that will deepen our learning about history…and about ourselves.
Course professor: Michael Fahy

EECS 494 - Computer Game Design & Development (Fall 2018)
Concepts and methods for the design and development of computer games. Topics include: history of games, 2D graphics and animation, sprites, 3D animation, binary space partition trees, software engineering, game design, interactive fiction, user interfaces, artificial intelligence, game SDK’s, networking, multi-player games, game development environments, commercialization of software.
Course professor: Austin Yarger

HONORS 240 sec. 001 - The Games We Play (Fall 2018)
This Honors Core course introduces students to the social sciences through the concept of games. In the course we will study:
- the problems of social cooperation, conflict, and competition;
- human motivation as well as social action and roles;
- the institutions and rules that affect motivation, action, and roles, both formal institutions such as governments, universities, or sports leagues, and informal ones, such as gender roles, old boys’ networks, or the unwritten rules in sports.
Course professor: Mika LaVaque-Manty

PSYCH 401, sec. 017 The Meaning of Play in Early Childhood (Fall 2018)
Play is an essential aspect of early childhood learning and development. This course will explore many aspects of play including the history of play, play cross-culturally, how play is influenced by privilege and diversity, and play as intervention.
Course professor: Paige Safyer

SAC 366, sec. 001 Adaptations (Fall 2018)
This course provides a critical overview of the theoretical, practical, and cultural issues related to adaptation. In addition to studying the ways that books and short stories get transformed into screenplays and movies, we will study cinema’s relation to a wide variety of media, including theater, television, comic books, and video games.
Course professor: Daniel Chilcote Herbert

SAC 367 - Digital Media and Identity (Fall 2018)
This course examines how identity (who we are) and identification (how we connect to representations) functions in relationship to media that depicts deeply technologized cultures and states of virtuality. We will pay particular attention to how gender, race, and class are configured in relation to digital identities and representations of identity in cinema. In this course students will study “traditional” media like film and video and also analyze how digital media like websites, animations, and video games work. 
Course professor: Sheila Murphy