Analysis of Play, Feb 17th 2014

Today

1) Grades! Delicious grades! 2) Play this week: at least 2 Facebook games3) Game studies and the disciplines4) From our readings5) Discussion(s): what do we like here? What is

self-evident? Do we want more? 6) Homework

Grades

You should either have a Tumblr grade now, or you will have later today (I got halfway through transferring from the “real” grade book to the Niihka one). If you don’t see grades for those entries later today, email me.

Make sure you’re keeping up! I went soft these first few weeks.

Related to that

I have passed around some handy-dandy 3x5 cards.

I want you to take two. Write your name on each of them. On the back of one, write down one thing you’d love to discuss in the next three weeks of class. On the back of the other, write down the blog entry you’re most interested in hearing feedback about.

Pass them to meI’m going to use the topics as a guide for what we read the week-after-next.

The other set of cards, I’m going to send back out to all of you. For this week, you will be expected to read the blog of the person whose card you get (so if you get yourself, let me know fast). You will then write a response to one of that person’s entries. This will replace your “something cool “for this week.

Play time…This week I want you to play a couple of Facebook games. You can pick which ones. As you play– at least a half hour each– think about why people would enjoy these games.

Game Studies

As I mentioned last class, game studies is only very recently a “thing.” Most of the people– even now– who write work in game studies are actually scholars in another academic area. For example me: I’m a rhetorician, generally housed in either an English or writing department, college pending. Other common fields to see in game studies are the social sciences, philosophy, history, education, and obviously computer science and related tech fields.

Today: Psychology

The readings you did today are not the deepest pieces of game studies psychology work, of course. What I wanted to give you was a reader-friendly cross-section that hits on at least a few key ideas that psychologists tend to examine from games.

Let’s run through them.

Immersion…

Anonymity…

From Penny Arcade– who happen to be the sort of the people they mock.

Scores, scores, scores…

He took that well.

Avatars…

Looks just like me.

For Wednesday…

On Wednesday, I want to talk about your two group related projects and check in to make sure the writing is going okay for your first analysis.

Once we do that, we will play a game in class and talk about another psychological concept.