Analysis of Play, September 10th

September 10, 2014

Today

1) Icebreaker – uno mas2) Gameplay for this week: Hearthstone3) Posting ‘bout the football! 4) Discussion: Dat Bogost, tho5) Form Your Groups of 36) Name thyselves, pick thine mascot7) De-Volver discussion8) Homework

Icebreaker: what was your first video game?

This week, I want you to spend at least an hour playing Hearthstone, the WoW themed CCG from Blizzard.

The game is free, and is on all the lab machines, but you will need an account at battle.net

Football

After this week, we have one game in the books. So you won or you lost, and you got to see how your players perform.

Make sure to make a post to the Gameplay Experience page about your fantasy football experience this week. And check your line-up to see if you need to make changes.

The readings

For today, I had you read two pieces by Ian Bogost. Bogost, relatively speaking, is a huge deal in game studies, to the point that people will ask why you didn’t cite him in some cases.

His work is a nice foundational place to go if you need a way of looking at things, though with the explosion of new game scholarship,

Bogost

“In this sense, the people who play video games develop values, strategies, and approaches to the practice of play itself.”

Bogost

“In other words, video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate. Game developers can learn to create games that make deliberate expressions about the world. Players can learn to read and critique these models, deliberating the implications of such claims.”

Bogost

“Instead of understanding play as child’s activity, or as the means to consume games, or even as the shifting centers of meaning in poststructuralist thought, I suggest adopting Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s useful, abstract definition of the term: ‘play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.’”

Mo’ Bogost

“Procedurality gets its name from the function of the processor—procedurality is the principal value of the computer, which creates meaning through the interaction of algorithms.”

Bogost

“Video games depict real and imagined systems by creating procedural models of those systems, that is, by imposing sets of rules that create particular possibility spaces for play.”

Bogost

“I suggest the name procedural rhetoric for the practice of using processes persuasively…”

A shift…

Today I want you to form your groups for the presentation and De-volver assignments. Take some time to talk to each other. You’ll want to find people with similar interests and ideas so that your groups run smoothly.

Groups of three (3). Not 4. Not 5. Maybe 2, if you really want. Not 1.

Pick your group, pick a name and a mascot, and email that info to me.

Let’s discuss…

The De-volver and the presentation. I’m going to hop to the course website. Follow me!

If we have time…

Let’s play the McDonald’s game! Mcvideogame.com

For Friday

Read: Gee and Steinkuehler

In-class: more game theory/some play time