The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry
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Overview:
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The Odyssey and Ulysses, Beowulf and Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest, The Bible and Capital. In the humanities there is a long history of "big book" seminarsclasses that focus on a single text, its surrounding literature, and its greater historical and cultural impact. How would a class like that function in a game studies and game design context? Since 2015, University of California, Davis' Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux have been teaching quarter-long classes studying a single piece of software, like Super Mario Bros., Doom, Final Fantasy VII, and Kentucky Route Zero. In this session, they will share their methods, results, and conclusions after teaching one game, one quarter. Notably, they have found that, by selecting a game with a diverse community of players, constraining the subject matter to produce expertise, then deploying this knowledge as a lens to think about technology and culture, students emerge from our single game seminars with markedly higher technical, historical, philosophical, and design proficiencies than more general surveys.
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