An analysis of the successes and shortcomings of teaching video game analysis through a case study of ENG 3930 – 0002, a special topics class taught at the University of Central Florida in the spring of 2012.
Contents
• Introduction
• Planning
o Initial Goal
o Concerns with Assigning Games
• Teaching
• Student Analysis
• Plans for the Future
Introduction
In the spring of 2012 I, Concetta Bommarito, was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to teach a class of my design at the University of Central Florida where I am currently getting a doctorate with the Texts and Technologies department. Being that my research is in how interactivity has changed narrative, specifically in video games, I decided to teach a class on analyzing games.
In my research I found surprisingly few institutions that offered classes on game analysis rather than game design and even fewer educators publishing on how to teach game analysis. This made setting up the class difficult and in several instances I relied more on my training as a literary instructor than most of the resources I found online.
Despite the difficulties in setting the class up, this was perhaps the most rewarding class I have ever taught. I was fortunate to have a class of intelligent and very insightful students who were truly engaged in the subject matter and who produced truly remarkable analysis of games that often made me reevaluate my own research.
Here on the class blog are mine and my students’ closing thoughts on the class along with our analysis of how classes like this should be taught in future.
Planning
Note: Much of this section is taken from a presentation I gave on the class at the 2012 National Popular Culture Association conference in Boston. The slides for that presentation can be found here.
Initial Goal
To give students the tools to more critically analyze video games by introducing them to several critical works across disciplines and teaching them how to use these works in their analysis.
This goal would be achieved by having students use the readings to analyze games using the readings with an emphasis on gameplay as main narrative drive.
Concerns with Assigning Games
When deciding which games to assign, I ran across several concerns that fell into three main categories:
Issue of Skill: Not all gamers are at the same skill level and beating games might boil down to familiarity rather than ability.
Era-Driven Skill: Michael Abbott of Brainy Gamer has discussed the difficulty of teaching students how to play older games (Ultima IV in particular) and my students echoed this sentiment; while having a class discussion on Kickstarter and in particular Wasteland 2, I made mention that I had considered assigning the original Wasteland for class. Students were generally interested in such an assignment till I explained that Wasteland conserved disc space by having all in-game dialogue printed in a separate manual that the game would refer players to in-game. One student in particular summed up the class attitude rather succinctly: “Oh… that would be too annoying.”
I do not blame them for this attitude; I too put off playing Wasteland because of how tedious this process could be. While forcing students to play games with graphical and/or technical limitations would be appropriate for a historical survey of games, it would probably more detrimental than helpful in a critical analysis survey class. In future, however, Wasteland will be on the recommended games list due to its cultural and historic significance (see below).
Genre-Driven Skill: We often group all game players into the one ubiquitous category of ‘gamer’ but in reality gamers of various genres are quite different from one another in terms of standards and abilities. An avid platformer might have trouble with role-playing games and vice versa.
There are also health issues associated with certain genres. I myself develop motion sickness when playing first person shooters if the frame rate drops and I have had students tell me the fast speed of, among others, Super Meat Boy, gives them the same type of motion sickness. These as well as epileptic and other health concerns need to be kept in mind when assigning games.
Difficulty-Driven Skill: Even if a teacher manages to assign a game in a student’s comfort zone, there is still the problem of beating the game in a reasonable time. More often than not the length of a game is due in part to how difficult it is rather than how much gameplay it has.
For some genres difficulty can be overcome with a walkthrough. Many RPGs, Planescape: Torment and Fallout 3 for example, rely on a numbered status system that can easily be worked and/or exploited to give a player high stats near the beginning of the game thus making the game much easier. For other genres difficulty can be a true roadblock to completion. Even an avid platformer will have difficulty defeating Super Meat Boy or I Want to be the Guy: The Movie, The Game, and these ultra hard games should not be assigned despite how important they are to the indie gaming scene.
Issue of Finance and Availability: Gaming can be an expensive hobby and while the average new game is cheaper than most text books certain games that are important to gaming history are harder to come by and carry a high price tag. Some sort of gaming lab with machines set up to run these games for students would be ideal, but for institutions that cannot afford such a facility students will have to eat this cost.
Console Availability: Even though it is one of the most important JRPGs for its introducing the genre to a wider Western audience, it would be difficult to assign Final Fantasy VII. Students would not only have to track down a copy of the game but a Playstation to play it on. Even buying it on the Playstation Network students would still have to buy a Playstation 3 to play it on.
Many games important to gaming history have this problem. While services like Steam and Good Old Games are making older computer games available, console games still for the most part require a newer console to run on making the cost to students several hundred dollars more than is reasonable.
PC Power: More and more students are coming to college with netbook or tablet computers. This is fine for most classes, but for gaming this can be problematic. While several classic games are seeing re-releases on tablets and phones (Final Fantasy Tactics for the iPhone and iPad for example) many games will depend on the student’s ability to run them on his or her PC.
Thankfully, most 90s PC games will run on a netbook so long as there are not too many 3D elements. This makes the Black Isle catalogue of games a great choice for the student on a budget.
Issue of Time: Finally we come to the issue of time. Students may have the skills and resources to play all of the games that you assign, but with some games taking anywhere from 60-80 hours to play they simply might not have the time to finish them all. When assigning games, it is important to keep in mind that your class is not the only class they have. Students need the time to finish your work and their other classes if they are to perform well on assignments.
One resource I wish I had known earlier is howlongtobeat.com. This community takes the average playtime of its members and divides it up by main quest line, side missions, speedruns, and others to determine how long a game should take to beat. In future, these estimates should be added to the syllabus to help students choose which games they have time to play.
Solution: I decided to assign short indie/Flash games that focus on one point/aspect of gaming and couple them with readings that support this aspect and/or are illustrated by the game. All games and readings were offered to students free online, though some went and bought copies of games and books we discussed in class on their own.
For example, the first readings we had were Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law”, a flash game interpretation of the short story, and excerpts from Jean Paul Satre’s Nausea and Existentialism and Human Emotions. Students were asked to use the readings to explore whether the second ‘secret’ ending of the Flash version of “Before the Law” kept with the spirit of the original story and how the gamer’s interactions with the text differ from the reader of the original work.
New Concern: If students are only playing shorter works then they are not studying the longer epic format that most games are presented in. This is problematic if the class goal is to give students the skills to analyze games as a whole.
Final Class Model (A Revised Literature Class Model):
Have students choose a game to work with all semester and create an environment for them to discuss that work in. Ultimately, this environment mimicked gamer culture and culminated in a mock academic conference.
Teaching
Note: Parts of this section are taken from a presentation I gave on the class at the 2012 National Popular Culture Association conference in Boston. The slides for that presentation can be found here.
As with all classes, even the best planning cannot cover all concerns that might come up in a class. Below are a few of these concerns that came up throughout the semester.
Media Vilification of Games: just like comics and film before them – and theater and the novel before that – video games have been a target of self-proclaimed morality groups looking to scapegoat video games for their perceived decline of Western civilization. This is barely an exaggeration; a combination of faulty research and sensationalist news media have portrayed video games as pornographic murder simulators that train youth to become violent antisocial career criminals. Again, this is only a slight exaggeration.
The consequences of this type of reporting have followed me as a games theorist. As a PhD student I have had colleagues and professors alike question the value of my research, some politely, some rudely, some very dismissively, all reactions I never had as a literary scholar. As such, I am often hesitant to outright call myself a games theorist in front of people I do not know very well.
I can only imagine that my students felt a bit of this trepidation, especially when during the first few weeks the most common question asked was whether or not a specific game was ‘academic’ enough to write about. This problem was partially solved when we had a class discussion in which I asked them to tell me their planned game of study and commented on ways in which they could go about doing their research.
‘Creepy Treehouse’ Effect: This class, like many others, used social media to get students communicating with each other on their projects and readings. This could become disconcerting to students as they may feel that an invite to a professor’s social network is an intrusion into their private online social life. Several teaching blogs have called this the “creepy treehouse effect” and it can affect student willingness to participate in online discussions.
It is for this reason that I chose to stay away from making students create materials online. Surprisingly, students actually requested an online component, stating that there was not enough time in class to fully discuss the games and readings. We partially implemented a Google Group and a SubReddit, but they had minimum success since they were not fully integrated into the class. Next time I teach, I will have the class maintain some sort of online presence as part of their participation grade.
Student Analysis
At the completion of the class I asked students to weigh in on how they felt the class went. 18 of my 33 students answered this survey. The following is a compilation of the questions I asked and their responses.
The questions and students’ unedited responses to each can be found here.
The Games:
Among those who expressed a preference, students mostly appreciated the games I assigned for their relevance to the readings and their enjoyable game mechanics.
The Stanley Parable and One Chance tied for most praised games with six students recommending them for future versions of the class. The Stanley Parable was praised for its writing, citing that the narrator’s direction made the game enjoyable to replay. Though no students officially derided the game officially in the survey, it should be noted that students did express to me in person that the narrator felt intrusive and ‘annoying’ when ordering the player around.
The results for One Chance are surprising since in class most students felt angry towards the game’s focus on eliminating the option to replay through the game. One student in the survey echoed the in-class remarks, but most students answering the survey praised the emotional impact of the game and how its gameplay was a ‘meditation’ on games as a whole in the same ways that The Stanley Parable is.
Katawa Shoujo came in second with five students recommending it for future classes. The three students that recommended cutting it only did so on the grounds that it and Yume Nikki were the longer games on the list. The praise for Katawa Shoujo came from its emotional resonance and how unfamiliar dating sims are to Western audiences. Many students appreciated that this class made them play a game that they would not have otherwise played.
Covetus had the most negative feedback with seven of the 18 respondents disliking it with no students defending it. Students criticized the game for being not enjoyable, ‘mundane’ and ‘creepy’. However, of the seven critics three conceded that the ‘argument’ of the game is relevant to the readings and so if it were replaced I would have to find a game that fit as well. One student also recommended that if the game stayed in the reading list I should include a warning for ‘the flashing lights and overall trippy creepiness’.
Yume Nikki was the second most criticized with six critics. While two students praised the game’s relevance to the class and our class discussion of the gameplay the six who disliked it complained that the game took so long since they did not know where to go and were unsettled by the games nightmare atmosphere. Of the six critics, however, two admitted that the game worked well with the readings and recommended Yume Nikki as an optional play.
Student Recommendation:
• Team Fortress 2 because it is free, the class can play it together, and it covers superflat and transmedia storytelling
• Abobo's Big Adventure in conjunction with viewing the Double Fine Adventure material and convergence culture
• Tower Defense games (Gemcraft, Bloons TD, Pokemon TD or some sort of WC3 map) in conjunction with the Foucault reading
• Continuity (Flash Game)
• The Portal Flash Game
• Pandemic 2 (in conjunction with Foucault)
• 5 Days a Stranger and its related spin offs and sequels
• Coma
• Super Monday Night Combat “is free to play and is very Marxist”
• Pick a free to play MMO and have the class play for a week in conjunction with a Marxist reading
The Readings:
Of the 18 respondents, 14 wanted the class to have more theory. This might partially be that the class was overwhelmingly English majors: about half were Literature Majors and the other Creative Writing with one Film student, one student in Game Design, and one student who’s major was Mathematics.
Most readings were criticized because students did not find them relevant to their individual project. Seven students thought the French translations of Foucault and Sartre were too ‘dense’ and/or ‘complicated’ for the class. However, most students used Foucault in their final projects leading one student to lament having to hear the term ‘Panopticism’ throughout the end of semester conferences. In light of this, it would be rather hard to cut Foucault from the class.
The Sartre reading would also be difficult to cut since it was given in conjunction with the Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ and the flash game based on it. This first assignment was a huge success, with students in the class discussion accompanying this survey praising it as a great way to set the tone of the class. It might be ill advised to change this popular assignment.
The most criticized reading was Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The three critics of this reading pointed out that most students did not in fact use it in their projects and that it was not covered as much in class as the other texts. Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ might be a better replacement.
Though it did not receive as much criticism, it should be noted that the two critics of the Bordo reading did not criticize the reading itself but the class discussion. Both expressed feeling uncomfortable, one because the student was getting an overabundance of feminist theory in other classes, but the other because they felt “wrong for not finding a character’s gender to be the most important part about them”. Issues of gender, race, and sexuality are often difficult for students to discuss and if one student reported feeling uncomfortable it is possible several others were and did not report it. I might need a framing reading to start such delicate subjects, especially if I add more of these theorists as several students have requested.
Requested Theorists/Theories/Readings
• determinism against existentialism to compare WRPGs and JRPGs
• more on gender theory
• more on queer theory
• more on ludology in video games and narratology
• post-colonialism
• Marxist
• Deconstruction
• reader oriented criticism
• Saussure’s Structuralism and Derrida’s Deconstructionism in terms of
viewing the (game) world in terms of established signifiers, signs,
binaries, etc.
• Transhumanism
• Video Game Theory Reader as a required text
• Judith Butler
• Harraway Cyborg Manifesto
• Lisa Nakamura has a dated but relevant article about gender sterotypes in MUDS ("Race in/for Cyberspace").
• Julian Dibbell has an incredibly interesting article called "A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society."
• Michael Heim has an article called "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace" which in some ways deals with the paradox of creation and freedom in a pre-defined space.
• "Reading Digital Culture," edited by David Trend.
The Assignments:
The most pervasive comment was to spread assignments out more evenly. Originally I placed the major assignments due at the end of class anticipating that the Let’s Play and the final paper would take the semester to finish. However, many students, despite my warnings, waited till the end of the semester to complete the work rather than meet the suggested benchmarks. Since this class is very work-intensive, more definitive grades need to be given out sporadically throughout the semester. This means having smaller graded assignments that can gage student progress with their final projects.
Manny students felt that there should be a pool of games for each assignment and some sort of online component that lets students post on each game that they play. Considering all of the theory that was suggested for the class it might be a good idea to have readings in a similar pool.
After Class Communications
Of the 18 students that replied to the survey all but one wished to keep in contact with myself and the class. The one student disinterested in staying with the class wished to possibly be on a mailing list of some sort for future readings for the class. Most students were willing to get together outside of class to continue to play and discuss games and five in particular expressed interest in becoming part of the gaming industry.
Plans for the Future
Luckily the class went so well that I have been given the opportunity to teach the class again in the Fall. The site for the new class can be found here: http://vgculturefall2012.blogspot.com.
