video game assignment

Programming assignments #3 and #4 - 3D Video Game

CS 248 - Introduction to Computer Graphics Autumn Quarter, 1999 Marc Levoy Handout #8

Required functionality

A few hints, video game submission requirements.

Make Your Own Video Game for Kids!

• How to Teach Variables to Kids
• Python for Kids: A Beginner’s Guide to Learning Programming with Python

Kids love to play video games. That much is obvious. But wouldn’t it be cool if they could make their screen time less passive and more productive? With Tynker, they can. By learning to code their own games, kids become creators instead of just consumers. And not only will they be having fun, but programming video games has proven to accelerate kids’ academics in math, science and reading, while giving them a skill that will open up countless future job opportunities.

At Tynker, kids and teens of all ages and skill levels can video game development with programming activities, built-in tutorials, online support, coding puzzles , mini-games, and more. So let’s learn more about making your own games for kids.

How to Make Easy Games for Kids?

Kids can make their own video games with coding platforms designed for kids! Children can use user-friendly game development tools like Scratch , Tynker , and GameMaker to build their own video games. These platforms are designed to be accessible and suitable for all skill levels, making it easy for kids to learn programming and game design without feeling overwhelmed

Children can develop their creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills through engaging tutorials and interactive interfaces as they make games. As they gain experience, kids can graduate into more advanced video game coding tools like Unity or Unreal Engine to create increasingly sophisticated games.

Collaborating with others, either online or in-person, can further enhance their learning and foster teamwork. When encouraged to “build your own video game,” children have fun and develop a valuable skill set that can translate into future opportunities within the growing gaming industry. Plus they experience the pride that goeas along with being able to say, “I know how to create my own video game.”

Where to Begin When Your Child Wants to Create a Video Game?

If your child is interested in creating a video game, start by researching age-appropriate game maker online platforms like Scratch , Tynker , or Kodu , which are designed to be accessible and engaging for young learners. Please encourage your child to explore tutorials, examples, and community projects to familiarize themselves with the platform and gather inspiration. Next, help them brainstorm and plan their game concept, including characters, storyline, and game mechanics. As they develop their game, provide support and encouragement and celebrate their progress. Encourage collaboration with friends or online communities to enhance learning and teamwork.

What is the Easiest Game to Code for Kids?

One of the easiest games for kids to code is a block coding game using Tynker. Tynker is a fantastic platform designed specifically for young learners who are new to coding. It utilizes a block-based coding system, which means that instead of typing out complex code, kids can use colorful blocks that snap together like puzzle pieces. This makes coding accessible and fun for children, as they can drag and drop blocks to create their own games, characters, and interactive stories. With Tynker, kids can explore their creativity, learn coding fundamentals, and see their ideas come to life in the form of fun and engaging games. Whether it’s designing a maze, creating a character that jumps, or making a simple storytelling game, Tynker provides a supportive environment for kids to embark on their coding journey while having a blast along the way.

5 Great Reasons to Make Video Games with Tynker

Empower your kids to make their own games paving the way for endless creativity and fun. Experience the thrill of making your own video games for free, and watch as your children unlock their true potential with Tynker.

• Award-Winning Platform – Over 600 hours of unique content.
• Self-Guided – Your child will make games on their own, at their own pace.
• Support – Step-by-step instructions, how-to video guides, and online classes.
• All Ages – From block coding to text coding like Python and JavaScript.
• Mobile Apps – take Tynker Junior, Tynker, and Mod Creator on-the-go.

*All for a fantastic price! Our annual plan breaks down to just 33 cents per day .

Game Design Courses on Tynker

Intro to coding:.

Glitch Manor – (Ages 7+) Explore a haunted mansion, fight off zombies, solve mysteries, and more with 80 programming activities and 16 coding puzzles.

Turing’s Tower – (Ages 9+) Scour the globe and repair a flying tower to fight off a giant robotic dragon in this steampunk-styled platformer game with 56 programming activities and 16 coding puzzles.

Intermediate Game Design: Ages 8-13

Star Runner – Build 8 fun arcade games to advance your coding skills and learn 2D motion, pen drawing, and animation.

Goblin Quest – Use code to explore secret worlds, solve dungeon puzzles, and program armies to follow your commands.

Advanced Game Design: Ages 14+

Drone Menace – Program a multi-level arcade game with a scoring system, win-loss scenarios, and special effects.

Gravity Sling – Build an Angry Birds-style physics-based catapult game while learning to program gravity and collisions and even create a black hole!

Ninja Runner – Use advanced physics engine commands as you program a platformer game with your own hero and enemy A.I.

How Kids Learn to Code while Building Games

Building a game is an involved process, touching on a variety of left brain (logic) and right brain (creativity) functions while designing and programming scenes. All the planning that goes into game making increases kids’ ability to focus on tasks for long periods of time and see projects through to completion while developing their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

• Interactive Scenes – place characters, make animations, and add effects. Kids can even draw their own characters and animate them with multiple frames.
• Sound – set the mood for any kind of scenario with music. Whether they want a dramatic intro sequence or an exciting duel, kids can choose from a variety of music clips and sound effects from our library. They can even compose their own music using our built-in MIDI interface and Tynker’s Synth Blocks.
• Character Motion – use loops to program the motion of characters and coordinate geometry to move sprites across the screen. For example, when programming a Pong or Brick Breaker game, kids have to use angles and speed to move the paddle and the ball.
• Game Play – program whether to detect user input from a mouse or the arrow keys and write code to handle these events. For example, press the spacebar to jump or click and the mouse to pop a balloon.
• Keeping Score – use variables and counters to keep track of the score, health, and number of lives, increasing and decreasing them based on key events during gameplay. Advanced users can even build leaderboards to rank players in the community.
• Detecting Win/Loss Conditions – use conditional logic to determine if a player won or lost a game.

How Can Video Game Coding Help Develop Programming Skills?

• Video game coding is engaging and motivating for developing programming skills.
• It keeps individuals invested in coding through fun and interactive games.
• Real-world challenges like character movement and collision detection reinforce programming concepts.
• Game development fosters problem-solving and logical thinking by breaking complex problems into smaller tasks.
• It combines technical and creative abilities through storytelling, art, and game mechanics.
• Debugging games teaches attention to detail and effective error-handling.
• It often involves teamwork, improving communication and collaboration skills.
• Coding games exposes programmers to various technologies and platforms.
• Completed game projects can be showcased in portfolios for job or academic opportunities.
• Overall, video game coding is a practical way to develop a broad spectrum of programming skills applicable to computer science and beyond.

Tynker’s Global Community

Check out these great block coding projects from our global community to see how kids are creating stages, animating characters, and producing sound with a variety of activities and interactive games.

For support, check out our Tynker Toolbox blog where we show kids how to design their own platformer game using two great tools:

• The Level Editor lets you drag-and-drop game elements visually and create fun levels super fast.
• The Platformer Blocks help you code platformer actors to move left-and-right. Many of the props and characters in the Level Editor come with prebuilt code, which can be customized as needed.

Tynker Summer Code Jam

Here are a few game gifs designed by our code jammers:.

We also have an incredible 8-week Summer Code Jam in which young coders from around the world compete for up to $10,000 in prizes by creating their own projects.

This is the perfect time to unlock your child’s potential with a subscription to Tynker.

We can’t wait to see what your child will create with code!

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CMN 176v: Video Games

Game design readings.

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How to write a video game story

I took a game writing course. Here’s what I learned

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by Colin Campbell

Illustrations by M. Booth

My first attempt at writing a video game script begins with the socialist journalist and activist Marina Ginestà, a remarkable woman who died five years ago, at the age of 94.

Although she lived an eventful life, she’s most famous for a photograph taken of her when she was 17 years old, standing on the rooftop of a Barcelona hotel, a rifle slung over her shoulder. It’s one of the most arresting images of the Spanish Civil War, in which young, idealistic Europeans like Ginestà fought for democracy, against a coalition of fascists and aristocrats.

I’m going to use that photograph as the first building block of my game. You see, I’ve signed onto an online course called Story for Video Games , a six-session investigation of interactive narrative. By the end of the course, I hope to have created a fully fleshed story for a game. There’s no coding or art. I only have to write.

The course is run by John Yorke, the author of Into the Woods , a book on how stories work. He also runs courses on writing novels, plays, movie scripts, and TV dramas. He’s spent most of his career in British television, holding senior roles on the BBC’s most popular production, the rollicking soap opera EastEnders .

Yorke tells me that games pose a particular challenge because of their interactivity, and their reliance on spectacular visual effects.

“In games, the writing often takes second place to design and technology,” he says. “If developers invest more in the writing, in the very best screenwriters, that’s going to take them to the next level.”

Yorke says he plays “AAA, blockbuster games, when I can find the time.” He is assisted by experts in gaming, including Caroline Marchal, CEO of studio Interior Night, which is currently working on a narrative game for Sega. She formerly worked at Quantic Dream, where she was lead game designer for Beyond: Two Souls . Quantic Dream is arguably the world’s most ambitious studio when it comes to interactive narratives and character-driven gaming, seen in its most recent title, 2018’s Detroit: Become Human , which has sold 2 million copies.

“The big difference between movies or novels and video games is that, because they’re interactive, the audience is actually part of the experience in a way other media doesn’t offer,” she says. “So the journey they’re going through is the same as that of the protagonist. That creates challenges as well as opportunities.”

“The audience is actually part of the experience in a way other media doesn’t offer”

The session’s first exercise is to create a protagonist. Yorke asks that I mention the game’s genre in my written presentation, but he’s much more interested in the character at the center of my game than in the way the game plays. He says games are beginning to escape a long history of character cliches and stereotypes, and he’s looking for his students’ work to reflect that progress.

“I’ve seen a lot of really basic, James Bond-level characterizations in games,” he says. “It’s done out of a desire for safety. The games companies think that’s the easiest person for players to empathize with. But I think they’re wrong. That’s not how empathy really works. Empathy is about finding something inside a character that’s flawed and damaged; that you understand.”

Yorke and Marchal’s introduction to the course states their belief that today’s games should focus as much on stories as on activities. They point toward the recent success of narrative games in which protagonists (and antagonists) have displayed more depth and human resonance than in years gone by. Their gallery of examples includes The Last of Us , Her Story , Overwatch , and Reigns .

I want to find out if they’re right. Is character really as important in a game as it is in a novel or a play? So I’m going to write my story.

Creating stories

There’s one snag. I’ve been writing about games for decades. I’m deeply interested in how they work and how they affect me. But I have never in my life felt the least inclination to actually make one.

It’s not that I’m averse to telling stories. I’ve written two novels , so theoretically, I ought to at least be curious about writing a story-based game. But in the realms of fiction, I’ve always cared more about why people do the things that they do, than on what they actually do. My novels include few action sequences. The stories focus mainly on dialogue and relationships. This is how novels work. But it’s not how games work.

Most narrative-heavy games, like Telltale’s story adventures, are constantly introducing action elements that draw focus away from emotional problems and toward practical and physical puzzles. But we’re beginning to see exceptions, such as Florence and My Child Lebensborn — both of which were ranked in Polygon’s top 50 games of last year — which focus almost entirely on story and resonance.

Yorke’s course is attractive to me because it’s dedicated to the curious idea that novels and games are the same, at least insofar as how they allow us to inhabit other people.

”All stories are forged from the same template,” he says. “What that template is and why we need to follow it is the subject of this course.”

Traditionally, games have mostly been dedicated to inhabiting the physicality of their characters. Mario jumps. Solid Snake sneaks. Lara climbs. Their personalities and backstories are sideshows, or thin marketing exercises. The characters lack substance. Their motivations are arcane.

Marchal points toward woeful completion rates for many single-player campaigns. “If you look at the statistics for single-player games, the majority of players do not finish them. That’s a storytelling problem,” she says. Raptr estimated that only one in 10 players completed the final mission in the original Red Dead Redemption (which has, admittedly, a very long campaign).

“There’s a lot we can learn from the ways stories have been crafted for centuries”

She argues that, in many big-budget action-adventures, players lose interest in the mechanics, but a good story would pull them forward. Players want to care about the game’s characters and about the most important element of any story: What happens next?

“There’s a lot we can learn from the ways stories have been crafted for centuries, which can then be crafted to work with just about any kind of game, even if it doesn’t seem to fit any kind of traditional linear model,” she says.

To fix this problem, Marchal argues that game designers must rise to the challenge of increasing narrative complexity. Technology today — animation, artificial intelligence, dynamic narrative systems — allows for deeper characters than in the past. We can all agree that Lara Croft is a more complicated and interesting person than she was 25 years ago. Tomb Raider’s recent three-game reboot was built around the story of Croft’s growth as a character.

As players become more demanding and diverse, they desire more believable, flawed, identifiable characters. In his introduction to the course, Yorke points out that game stories and linear stories fit the same patterns, but that they are not the same thing. They require specific approaches. “Writing for a linear medium is difficult,” he says. “Writing for games is even harder. There are very specific challenges and pitfalls to overcome. The task gets even more complex when you consider that narrative needs vary greatly from one game genre to another.”

I’m interested in writing about people and emotions. So it feels like I ought to be able to explore my ideas through the medium of games. At least, I want to find out if it’s possible. I know my game is never going to get made. I just want to see how far I am able to run with Yorke’s ideas.

And so, my game character comes to life.

Murderous communist

Olivia Espinoza is a woman in her early 20s. She dresses in factory-issue clothing or in dark, bohemian garb. She lives in Paris, in 1942, under Nazi occupation. She is a communist, a political idealist who works for the French Resistance. She is also a cold-eyed assassin.

I am required to supply some sort of visual aid to my character. Although Olivia is older than Marina Ginestà is in her photograph, the image sums her up nicely.

My game could be a shooter, or action-adventure. I’m interested in a human adventure, like A Case of Distrust , a noirish game I admire greatly, in which dialogue trees and visual puzzles lead the player toward the resolution of a mystery.

I want to see Olivia move through wartime Paris, engaging in awesome conversations with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, with collaborators and resistance fighters. I want to see her cope with encountering Jewish parents, hiding from the round-ups.

My desire to model Olivia’s story on a niche game turns out to be a mistake. When I present Olivia, my tutors say nice, encouraging things to me. But they’re confused about what she’ll actually be doing in the game, and they want to hear more about her motivations.

It’s important to me that this isn’t another game about killing people

They’re not familiar with A Case of Distrust, so I take the easy option and add $100 million to my imaginary development budget. It’s going to be a AAA extravaganza, more like The Last of Us .

But it’s important to me that this isn’t another game about killing people. I want to place severe restrictions on Olivia, so she can’t just run around Paris shooting Nazis. In my game, it’s going to be just as difficult to kill Nazis as it would have been in wartime Paris.

Of course, the game is all in my head, so I have unlimited access to the best coders, animators, and financial backers in the universe. But I also have tutors, and they warn me that my game must be created within the realms of the practically possible and the commercially viable.

They are kind enough to leave me with just enough wiggle room to ignore their guidance. I figure, if I’ve been given this opportunity to write my game, I’m not going to fret about what some bean counter at EA or Activision might think about it.

I understand, of course, that in the real world, my idea would have zero chance of attracting funding. It’s fine. I’m here to find out how interactive stories work. I already know how the game industry works.

Narrative arcs

Story in games can sometimes create an inherent friction between the writer’s ambitions, the designer’s goals, and the player’s desires.

Doom co-creator John Carmack once said , “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie: it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” Back in 1993 , Doom relied on its superb game design and graphical innovations to capture the imaginations of players.

But the world has moved on. Years later, the Doom of 2016 comes with a big narrative element that falls broadly into the same three-act pattern of a classic movie or play.

The unnamed playable character is faced with the challenge of closing a portal to hell. He resolves a series of crises, generally manifesting as hordes of monsters. He overcomes an antagonist and resolves the initial challenge. It’s true that he displays little in the way of personality — certainly, he’s no Hamlet — but he interacts with people who have motivations and flaws in a way that we do not see in the original game.

Characters must demonstrate a flaw that the story addresses

Overwatch is one of the most successful shooting games in the world, a modern successor of sorts to Doom . It is filled with characters like Tracer, D.Va, and Hanzo, whose backstories and personalities add significantly to the game’s appeal.

Like many creative writing tutors, Yorke argues that all great characters come with three things. They have to want something. They have to need something. And they have to demonstrate a flaw that the story addresses.

So I set to work on Olivia’s wants, needs, and flaws.

She is tasked by her resistance bosses with assassinating the Nazi chief of police in his fortified lair. What she wants is to complete her mission.

But she’s unhappy. She’s spent her life killing people, and yet finds no satisfaction, or reward, in her work. She needs to break free from her life of violence, while still staying true to her desire to defeat the Nazis and create a better world.

Olivia’s flaw is that she’s a dogmatic person who’s unable to understand her own despair. From a young age, she’s gained immense skills as a warrior, but in achieving excellence as an assassin, she’s denied herself basic humanity.

Inciting incidents

The course follows a pattern of investigation, followed by creativity, and then analysis. Each week, the students — there are about a dozen of us — watch YouTube clips, play games, and read story synopses from a variety of games. We offer perspectives on what we believe works well, and what doesn’t.

We look at motivations, antagonists, and inciting incidents, studying games as varied as Candy Crush , Ico , Evolve , The Crew , and Red Dead Redemption .

One element of game design that fascinates Yorke is the relationship between the player and the main character.

“There’s a contradiction between the agency a player has, and how that conflicts and contrasts with the desires of the game’s writer,” he says. “How you marry those two things together is difficult, but also an incredible opportunity, if you get it right.”

We move on to studying the classic three-act structure of stories

Some games, like multiplayer worlds, present “blank slate” characters that are built by the player, who fills in the blanks. But these stories cleave to narrative models based on heroes, villains, an inciting incident, crisis, and resolution. Resolution can come in the form of completing a mission or leveling up or acquiring a sword. These games are cast as “open-world” or as “sandboxes,” but they are essentially amalgamations of fairy tales, tied together with an overarching story.

I work my way through these examples, offering notes when required. My homework is evaluated by Yorke, Marchal, various tutors, and other students. Feedback is always delivered in a way that’s constructive and useful.

We move on to studying the classic three-act structure of stories, and how such a notion fits with games. I immerse myself in the detailed story arcs of Inside and Life is Strange .

The course addresses arguments about whether or not games, by being interactive, are fundamentally separate from linear forms. We look at mainstream literature and entertainment, from Macbeth to Jaws , drawing comparisons with games. We learn how linear structures work in the context of games, emphasizing how games bend and morph these structures in ways that are still being investigated by writers.

Redemption and rejection

I return to my project and try to apply what I’ve learned.

Yorke says it’s useful to be able to state a story’s theme in one word. My story about Olivia focuses on redemption. It’s about her relationship with deadly violence. The warrior-to-pacifist transformation has been told many times before, but rarely in the context of a video game.

Emerging pacifism throws up interesting challenges in the context of a game. I find myself struggling to find things for the player to do, while Olivia works through her journey. Again and again, my tutors try to correct my habit of longish dialogue tree sessions. I keep at it, honing my scenes to give the player as much agency and illusion of choice as possible.

Long story short, Olivia’s mission to take out the evil cop goes awry, and she accidentally kills the cop’s mistress. During her escape from the police station, Olivia kills two guards who get in her way. They are guarding a West African nun, who is being interrogated about the location of missing Jewish orphans. This is the inciting incident.

The nun knows an opportunity when she sees one. She wants Olivia to arrange for the escape of these orphans. The plan provides a short-term refuge for Olivia, so she agrees. But the nun has one stipulation. She asks that Olivia kill no more people during this mission. The nun sternly assures Olivia that while she is grateful to be free, the deaths of the soldiers are a stain on her own religious beliefs and eternal conscience.

This causes a friction between the two women, and within Olivia. Resolving this friction — the justification of violence as a means to an end — is where we encounter Olivia’s need. It also creates a challenge for the player throughout the game. Killing people will solve immediate problems, but will endanger the children. Stealth — which I have always loved playing — will be a core activity in my game.

As the game progresses, Olivia and the nun travel across Paris, evading patrols. They survive a series of dangerous encounters that allow us to explore cool Parisian locations, often converted for quasi-military purposes due to the war.

Missions often create practical problems that illustrate the pros and cons of the women’s competing ideologies. Pacifism is hard. It can also be dangerous and, in this setting, possibly self-defeating.

The gameplay structure is a little like that of A Way Out , which makes use of a variety of devices to tell a story about a prison break, and to explore the relationship between two very different convicts.

Pacifism can also be dangerous

My dialogue tasks are heavily influenced by Mike Bithell’s superb work in Subsurface Circular , in which characters are revealed through conversations that also progress the plot. Olivia and the nun argue with one another while the story moves forward. In turn, the player is presented with provocative arguments, and a little levity, as the two women buddy up.

Olivia is forged by violence. The nun is heavily influenced by origin Christianity, and by the ancient traditions of her upbringing. In time, they will both be forced to confront their own inconsistencies because (of course) nothing is as simple as it seems, most especially to ideologues.

When he reviews my story, Yorke suggests that I find a way to physically manifest this exchange of ideas. So I have the nun present Olivia with a necklace: an enamel tortoise charm. In her home country, the tortoise represents peace.

This reminds me of a lesson about writing, one that I’ve always struggled with. Physically, writing is the act of stringing words together. The production is text. But weaving words is barely the point. Writers must think in terms of images, because that’s what the reader “sees” when they’re reading.

I’m a person who thinks in the language of words. It’s difficult for me to construct images and then write about them. I do it the other way around. This is a problem.

But if I want to write a game, even this leap, from words to images, is not enough. Game writers have to go farther.

Stories and history

A few weeks into the course and it’s impossible for me to play games without thinking about story. I play Red Dead Redemption 2 and Tetris Effect . The first is chock-full of characters and stories. The second has almost no story at all, but incorporates imagery that suggests narrative forms, such as discovery and redemption.

The dichotomy of story and not-story is at the center of gaming history. In the early days of games, those beeping, menacing Space Invaders arrived without any apparent motivation, inner conflict, or backup plan. We just shot them, and they shot us, and everyone was happy. The action game was born.

At the same time, text adventures appeared — Zork , The Hobbit , A Mind Forever Voyaging — that were wholly stories, with characters, motivation, flaws, and plot twists. They were smart, provocative, and commercially marginal.

Over the next three decades, these entirely different forms came together, and action games began to include narrative elements. Role-playing adventures, the descendants of those text adventures, became action-oriented exercises, interspersing killing and fighting with cutscenes or walking conversations between characters.

Commercial considerations and marketing drove the embrace of narrative and character. Sonic the Hedgehog was born from Sega’s desire to show off the Genesis’ ability to render fast-moving action. The company wanted a mascot who could compete and contrast with Nintendo’s Mario. Sonic’s main attributes were speed and a cocky, anti-establishment attitude.

This naked branding fed into comics and cartoons, as the character’s popularity exploded. But Sonic has always been trapped inside the mundane ambitions of his creators, and has never evolved into anything more than a funny mascot. (I accept that not everyone will agree with this view.)

Throughout the ’90s, stories became a creative consideration. Like all human beings, game developers had been brought up enjoying stories, and wanted to add gravitas and drama to their work.

But game developers were often better at coding than they were at telling stories. They made their games, and then they grafted on some hackneyed version of Lord of the Rings or Star Trek. A few games managed to stand out because of their devotion to story and to mythology, such as the Final Fantasy series.

Game developers were often better at coding than they were at telling stories

Game publishers took note. Companies hired writers, usually to package up gameplay and art assets. Spinoff novels pulled convoluted series like Halo and Assassin’s Creed into some semblance of narrative form. Missions were cast as mini-stories, adding up to a baffling whole in which a princess was saved, a bomb deactivated, a tyrant deposed.

Critics began to write about games as stories, lambasting certain games for their ludonarrative dissonance in which the player’s actions are at odds with the personality or the aspirations of the on-screen character.

Big-budget games began to appear with more believable and compelling stories. BioShock, Mass Effect and Dragon Age explored the meaning of interactive stories, layering their narratives with provocative ideas about agency and heroism. They helped to establish games as fully rounded narrative experiences. Games now compete directly with the rest of the entertainment business, and must present themselves as coherent tales, in the same way as blockbuster movies. Many of the most highly prized games are seen as writerly endeavors.

The Witcher series is literally based on fantasy novels. The big games of 2018, like Red Dead Redemption 2 , Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Shadow of the Tomb Raider , all began life as stories about characters, not as tech demos in search of drama.

These days, game producers are more likely to view writers as central to big game projects. In press interviews, development team leaders like The Last of Us’ Neil Druckmann and Red Dead Redemption’s Dan Houser speak about themselves primarily as writers, and secondarily as producers or directors. When Square Enix rebooted Tomb Raider, it sent out its writer Rhianna Pratchett as a prime spokesperson. In interviews, she talked about Lara as a person, not as an amalgamation of polygons designed to deliver kicks to the player.

Diverse bunch

My tutors press me to tighten my story. They send me notes asking for more clarity, more interactivity, more drama, and more fun. What they really want, I divine, is more action. They poke at each scene. I rewrite. My game improves.

My fellow students are facing the same process. We chat with one another via forums. They are a diverse bunch of men and women from various countries, a mixture of mainstream writers who want to learn about games and game developers who want to learn about writing. The course costs around $1,600, and takes up maybe half a day per week for seven weeks.

Most of us have full-time jobs. So the only mandatory exercise is the writing of the game story; all the others are optional. It’s easygoing and good fun.

We’ve seen a remarkable growth of indie games with powerful stories and memorable characters

I’m fascinated by the diversity of the other students’ games and stories. One action-RPG tells the tale of a soldier’s lost pet. Another is a racing game about a group of cartoon couriers. One game follows the romantic adventures of a woman who does not conform to standard beauty ideals. Another takes on the god game genre, and delves into the Almighty’s personal relationship with life creation.

These writers are looking at ways to polish up their resumes or even to launch their own indie projects.

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a remarkable growth of indie games with powerful stories and memorable characters. Among them are some of my favorite games ever, including Tacoma , Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture , Rakuen , Blackwood Crossing , Orwell , and Virginia .

Action games are wonderful, but we all occasionally (or often) want something else. We want games to make us feel the way the best movies and books make us feel. And games are now providing that. It’s amazing that, only a decade ago, “ can games make you cry? ” was a genuinely interesting question. Now, who among us has not shed a tear at a game story?

Final exercise

For the final exercise, we must present our game stories, complete with descriptions of fully interactive elements. In my story, Olivia and the nun both make accommodations with one another’s beliefs, in order to save each other and to rescue the children. Olivia encounters the chief of police. The player decides if he lives or dies.

The nun falls into the hands of the Nazis. Olivia breaks into the Nazi compound, but when she finds the nun, Olivia discovers that she has been tortured beyond any possibility of escape. The nun begs to be spared further torture and her inevitable confession. She must die in order for the children to live. The nun sacrifices her own beliefs in the sanctity of life, while Olivia sacrifices her warrior self. The last person Olivia will ever kill is the nun (again, this is a player choice).

The tortoise “peace” necklace makes its reappearance in the final scene, offering Olivia a practical strategy for shepherding the children past Nazi guards, and onto a waiting boat bound for Britain.

In the final scene, we see her on a Normandy beach, gazing out across the English Channel. She will win the war, but she will kill no more. Her want, need, and flaw have been resolved.

Useful lessons

I’ve learned a ton of storytelling tips and techniques that shape the story, that add to its most intense beats, and that create an ending that feels satisfying and whole, at least to me. I feel the class has made me a better writer, and it’s made me understand game design more fully.

I’ve also learned to further appreciate how games are taking basic theories about story and subverting them in the name of fun and interactivity. When I play Reigns: Game of Thrones , I’m struck by how cleverly each character, each quest, and each decision follows a pattern of inciting incident, crisis, and resolution (though not always in that order).

Few games can (or should) blindly follow a three-act shape. But understanding form is how artists learn to subvert and surprise. This is the value of the course.

The biggest lesson is that writers of games aren’t merely storytellers; they are kinetic designers. Like all writers, they must create words by conjuring imagery. But they must also operate in the realm of action. The story is about the characters, of course. It’s also about what the player sees. But, most importantly, it’s about what the player does in the context of the narrative. Marrying character, action, and player together is the trick. This requires three-dimensional thinking that I now know for certain is a tough skill to master. My admiration for good game writers increases.

I still have no plans to make a game, but I’ll write up Olivia as a short story for my weekly fiction writers group. She exists in the world now. She and the nun have taught me something about what it means to be a person.

I hope my fellow students will find jobs, or project backers, and will bring their ideas into the world. That would make for the sort of narrative resolution Yorke would enjoy.

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I’m a curriculum writer, literacy educator, and all around book lover with a passion for helping English teachers engage their students with creative, high-quality resources. My mission? To make teaching English a whole lot easier for you, teacher friend! 

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Turn a Story into a Video Game: Creative Assignment For Any Novel or Short Story

Are your middle school ELA students obsessed with video games? I know that lately, gaming is all that some students want to talk about!  I also know that leaning into students’ interests creates instant buy-in. With this in mind, I came up with a multi-stage assignment that brings elements of video games into the middle school  ELA classroom. Combining the creativity of video games with the literacy skills required in English language arts keeps students engaged through the entire learning process.

Turning a Story into a Video Game Assignment is a flexible, appealing, and open-ended project that works at the end of almost any short story unit or novel study. What I love most about it is how versatile it is – you can use each of its eight components individually, or combine them into one large culminating assignment. 

It’s especially great for reluctant readers, or anyone who needs to make an outside-the-box connection with middle school ELA students. Best of all, both printer-friendly and digital versions of this assignment are available to help you meet the needs of all your learners. Here’s how it works:

Letter to the Video Game Developer

To begin, I like to invite my students to imagine that the story or novel they just read has become a best-seller. What happens to best-selling books? They need a video game tie-in, of course!

In this initial task, they need to write a letter to a video game developer . The purpose of the letter is to persuade the developer to make the story into a video game. As they write, middle school ELA students need to make a compelling argument for why the characters or conflict of the story would make for a fun game to play.

Select Your Players

Once the letter is complete, I like to ask students to choose three characters from the book or story, and determine how they will be controlled in the context of their video game.

Two of the characters they choose will be “playable” characters (PCs), meaning they can be controlled by the gamer. A third character will be a “non-playable” character, whose actions are controlled by the game. 

As part of this exercise, I like to encourage students to draw the characters and describe them in detail. To extend this exercise, you can also get your students to consider characters’ backstories, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Design Your World

In my opinion, one of the most engaging things about video games are the rich and complex worlds the characters live in. To bring this element of video games into the middle school ELA classroom, I like to have my students design the main “world” (AKA the setting) where most of the action of the game will take place.

During this process, I like to encourage students to use specific evidence from the novel or story to create their setting. As they create their design, students should consider where and when the story takes place, as well as the objects, structures, and potential obstacles they need to include.

Video Game Box Cover

What would a video game be without creative cover art ? I like to begin this task by leading a quick brainstorming session about the type of designs that would encourage someone to buy a video game.

After the discussion, I outline the necessary features of a video game box cover, including the title, author, image, and a slogan. As part of this process, I sometimes ask them to write a brief persuasive description of the game to include on the back of the “case,” as well as a quote or snippet from a “five-star review!”

When bringing the idea of a book-turned-video game into the ELA class, one project students will often spend the most time on is storyboarding the game itself.

I usually start by explaining that video game developers use storyboards – comic-book-like versions of the video game – to plan key scenes. After this discussion, students create a sequence of drawings to either show the levels of the game, or an important scene or event. Then, they explain and justify their choices, using evidence from the book or story to support their thinking.

Video Game Composer

I think that one of the most underrated parts of any video game is its score. Music has the power to set the mood and tone of any scene, and the dramatic scenes of a video game are no exception!

In the Video Game Composer task, I begin by asking students to think of three songs they would like to include in their video game adaption of a short story or novel.  

First, they need to explain which part of the video game each song would be used in. Next, they give details about how the lyrics or melody of each song connect to specific moments in the story or novel. I find this is a really effective way to encourage students to justify their thinking!

Game Conflict

Bringing video games into the ELA classroom presents a great opportunity to discuss the various types of conflicts in narrative writing. I usually begin by explaining the different types of conflict in the context of gaming – player vs. player, player vs. self, player vs. environment, and player vs. society.

After this discussion, students choose a conflict for players to encounter during their game, and explain their choice. Once they make their choice, I invite them to consider this conflict in terms of its impact on the characters of the game, as well as the overall mood and tone. Specifically, I might have them discuss how the conflict affects the relationship between the various characters. As an alternative, they could also write about how the game developer conveys different emotions through the conflict.

Game Time Interview

In the final task for Turn A Story Into a Video Game , students take on the role of the developer who created the video game adaptation of the story or novel. I start by asking students to imagine that they are being interviewed for Game Time magazine. With this in mind, they consider the answers to questions like:

• What kind of person would like to play this game?
• What do you think gamers can learn from the story told in this video game?
• What was the most difficult scene from the game to create?

As they respond to each question in short paragraphs, students explain their thinking with specific references to the plot and characters from the novel or short story. Once their drafts are complete, you could even have your students design and format the interview as it would appear in an actual gaming magazine, complete with images and pull quotes!

I hope these ideas help you find creative ways to incorporate video games into your ELA class , and connect with the gamers in your school! The digital version of this activity is available here .

Looking to give students more autonomy when it comes to reading? Transform your middle school ELA classroom with the Empowered Readers course !

Check out my post on 10 Tips to Engage Reluctant Readers in Middle School for more ideas to support your students.

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Resources and Daily Activities

• Charlotte Debate
• Critical Theory/MRG 2023 Presentation
• PCA/ACA Conference Presentation 2022
• PCAS/ACAS Presentation 2021
• SEACS 2021 Presentation
• SEACS 2022 Presentation
• SEACS 2023 Presentation
• SEACS 2024 Presentation
• SEWSA 2021 Presentation
• South Atlantic MLA Conference 2022
• Dr. Toscano’s Homepage
• Ethical Dilemmas for Homework
• Ethical Dilemmas to Ponder
• Mapping Our Personal Ethics
• April 12th: Writing Ethically
• April 17th: Ethics Continued
• April 19th: More on Ethics in Writing and Professional Contexts
• April 24th: Mastering Oral Presentations
• April 3rd: Research Fun
• Epistemology and Other Fun Research Ideas
• February 13th: Introduction to User Design
• Making Résumés and Cover Letters More Effective
• February 1st: Reflection on Workplace Messages
• February 20th: The Rhetoric of Technology
• February 22nd: Social Constructions of Technology
• February 6th: Plain Language
• January 11th: More Introduction to Class
• January 18th: Audience & Purpose
• Duty Format for Résumés
• Peter Profit’s Cover Letter
• January 25th: More on Résumés and Cover Letters
• Prose Practice for Next Class
• Prose Revision Assignment
• Revising Prose: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Good
• Sentence Clarity
• January 9th: Introduction to the Class
• Major Assignments
• March 13th: Introduction to Information Design
• March 15th: More on Information Design
• March 20th: Reporting Technical Information
• March 27th: The Great  I, Robot  Analysis
• May 1st: Final Portfolio Requirements
• Rhetorical Principles of Information Design
• Prejudice and Rhetoric
• Robin Williams’s Principles of Design
• Classmates Webpages (Fall 2017)
• December 4th: Presentations
• Major Assignments for ENGL 4182/5182 (Fall 2017)
• Designing with Color
• Important Images
• November 20th: Extra-Textual Elements
• November 27th: Presentation/Portfolio Workshop
• November 6th: In Living Color
• October 23rd: More on Type
• October 2nd: MIDTERM FUN!!!
• Beerknurd Calendar 2018
• Theory, theory, practice
• September 18th: The Whole Document
• September 25th: Page Design
• August 23rd: Introduction to the Class
• August 30th: Rhetoric, Words, and Composing
• December 6th: Words and Word Classes
• Major Assignments for ENGL 4183/5183 (Fall 2023)
• November 15th: Cohesive Rhythm
• November 1st: Stylistic Variations
• Rhetoric of Fear (prose example)
• November 8th: Rhetorical Effects of Punctuation
• October 11th: Choosing Adjectivals
• October 18th: Choosing Nominals
• October 4th: Form and Function
• September 13th: Verb is the Word!
• Parallelism
• September 6th: Sentence Patterns
• April 23rd: Presentation Discussion
• April 2nd: Artificial Intelligence Discussion, machine (super)learning
• April 4th: Writing and Reflecting Discussion
• April 9th: Tom Wheeler’s The History of Our Future (Part I)
• February 13th: Religion of Technology Part 3 of 3
• February 15th: Is Love a Technology?
• February 1st: Technology and Postmodernism
• February 20th: Technology and Gender
• February 22nd: Technology, Expediency, Racism
• February 27th: Writing Workshop, etc.
• February 6th: The Religion of Technology (Part 1 of 3)
• February 8th: Religion of Technology (Part 2 of 3)
• January 11th: Introduction to the Course
• January 16th: Isaac Asimov’s “Cult of Ignorance”
• January 18th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective
• January 23rd: Technology and Democracy
• January 25th: The Politics of Technology
• January 30th: Discussion on Writing as Thinking
• Major Assignments for Rhetoric of Technology
• March 12th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 1 of 3
• March 14th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 2 of 3
• March 19th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 3 of 3
• March 21st: Writing and Reflecting: Research and Synthesizing
• March 26th: Artificial Intelligence and Risk
• March 28th: Artificial Intelligence Book Reviews
• April 11th: Knoblauch. Ch. 4 and Ch. 5
• April 18th: Feminisms, Rhetorics, Herstories
• April 25th:  Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”
• April 4th: Jacques Derrida’s Positions
• February 15th: St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine [Rhetoric]
• Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 2
• Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 3
• February 22nd: Knoblauch. Ch. 1 and 2
• February 29th: Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method
• February 8th: Isocrates
• January 11th: Introduction to Class
• January 18th: Plato’s Phaedrus
• January 25th: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 1
• March 14th: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
• March 21st: Feminist Rhetoric(s)
• March 28th: Knoblauch’s Ch. 3 and More Constitutive Rhetoric
• Rhetorical Theory Assignments
• April 11th: McCarthyism Part 1
• April 18th: McCarthyism Part 2
• April 25th: The Satanic Panic
• April 4th: Suspense/Horror/Fear in Film
• February 14th: Fascism and Other Valentine’s Day Atrocities
• February 21st: Fascism Part 2
• February 7th: Fallacies Part 3 and American Politics Part 2
• January 10th: Introduction to the Class
• January 17th: Scapegoats & Conspiracies
• January 24th: The Rhetoric of Fear and Fallacies Part 1
• January 31st: Fallacies Part 2 and American Politics Part 1
• March 28th: Nineteen Eighty-Four
• March 7th: Fascism Part 3
• Rhetoric of Fear and Job Losses
• Pedagogical Theory for Study Abroad
• August 22nd: Science and Technology from a Humanistic Perspective
• August 24th: Science and Technology, a Humanistic Approach
• August 29th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 2
• August 31st: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4
• December 5th: Video Games and Violence, a more nuanced view
• November 14th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 27-end
• November 16th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Preface-Ch. 8
• November 21st: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ch. 9-Ch. 16
• November 28th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ch. 17-Ch. 24
• November 30th: Violence in Video Games
• November 7th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes Ch. 1-17
• November 9th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes, Ch. 18-26
• October 12th: Lies Economics Tells
• October 17th: Brief Histories of Medicine, Salerno, and Galen
• October 19th: Politicizing Science and Medicine
• October 24th: COVID-19 Facial Covering Rhetoric
• October 26th: Wells, H. G. Time Machine. Ch. 1-5
• October 31st: Wells, H. G. The Time Machine Ch. 6-The End
• October 3rd: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
• September 12th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
• September 19th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Prefaces and Ch. 1
• September 26th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 2
• September 28th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 5 and 6
• September 7th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 5 and 6
• August 19: Introduction to the Course
• August 21: More Introduction
• August 26th: Consider Media-ted Arguments
• August 28th: Media & American Culture
• September 11: Critical Theory
• September 16th: Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality
• September 18th: Postmodernism, Part 1
• September 4th: The Medium is the Message!
• September 9: The Public Sphere
• Assignments for Science Fiction and American Culture
• August 21: Introduction to to “Science Fiction and American Culture”
• August 23: More Introduction
• August 28: Gender Studies and Science Fiction
• August 30th: Robots and Zombies
• December 4: Witch Hunt Politics (Part I)
• December 6: Witch Hunt Politics (Part II)
• November 1: Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Part I)
• November 13: The Dispossessed (Part I)
• November 15: The Dispossessed (Part II)
• November 20: In/Human Beauty
• November 27: Wall-E and Trash
• November 6: Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Parts I and II)
• November 8: Octavia Butler’s Dawn (Parts III and IV)
• October 11th: Zone One (Part III)
• October 16th: Babel-17 (Parts I & II)
• October 18th: Babel-17 (Parts III, IV, & V)
• October 25: Inception (2010)
• October 30th: Interstellar (2014)
• October 4th: Zone One (Part 1)
• October 9th: Zone One (Part II)
• September 11th: William Gibson, Part I
• September 13th: William Gibson, Part II
• September 18: The Matrix (1999)
• September 20: Hackers (1995)
• September 25: Firefly and Black Mirror
• September 27th: All Systems Red
• September 6th: Alien Other and Worlds Beyond
• Teaching Portfolio
• A Practical Editing Situation
• American Culture, an Introduction
• Cultural Studies and Science Fiction Films
• Efficiency in Writing Reviews
• Feminism, An Introduction
• Fordism/Taylorism
• Frankenstein Part I
• Frankenstein Part II
• Futurism Introduction
• How to Lie with Statistics
• How to Make an Argument with Sources
• Isaac Asimov’s “A Cult of Ignorance”
• Judith Butler, an Introduction to Gender/Sexuality Studies
• Langdon Winner Summary: The Politics of Technology
• Oral Presentations
• Oratory and Argument Analysis
• Our Public Sphere
• Postmodernism Introduction
• Protesting Confederate Place
• Punctuation Refresher
• QT, the Existential Robot
• Religion of Technology Discussion
• Analyzing the Culture of Technical Writer Ads
• Rhetoric of Technology
• Visual Culture
• Visual Perception
• Visual Perception, Culture, and Rhetoric
• Visual Rhetoric
• Visuals for Technical Communication
• World War I Propaganda
• I, Robot Short Essay Topics
• Civilization, an Analysis
• The Sopranos
• Why Science Fiction?
• Zombies and Consumption Satire
• April 14th: Phallocentrism
• April 21st: Video Games and Neoliberalism
• April 7th: Video Games and Conquest

Assignments for Video Games & American Culture

• February 10th: Aesthetics and Culture
• February 17th: Narrative and Catharsis
• February 24th: Serious Games
• February 3rd: More History of Video Games
• January 13th: Introduction to the course
• January 20th: Introduction to Video Game Studies
• Marxism for Video Game Analysis
• Postmodernism for Video Game Analysis
• March 24th: Realism, Interpretation(s), and Meaning Making
• March 31st: Feminist Perspectives and Politics
• March 3rd: Risky Business?

Participation (Every Class Meeting)

This is not a drill-and-skill type of course. I expect everyone to be involved in class discussions, which are extremely important for critical thinking. You must contribute to class discussions. Fifteen or 18 percent (18% for 5000-level students) of your grade is based on participation.

In-class participation means you are ready to be called on at any time to respond to a question, prompt, and/ or suggestion about the course material. Yes, I will call on you in class periodically, so be prepared to demonstrate that you’re reflecting thoughtfully on the readings. Thoughtful reflection doesn’t mean you give THE answer; instead, it means you show awareness for the complexity of our subject by describing your interpretation or asking questions that demonstrate critical thinking (as opposed to certainty). We embrace ambiguity in this course.

Additional-class participation means you respond to questions, prompts, and/or suggestions about the course material without being called on.

Merely showing up will not get you participation credit—you must engage the course materials. If you’re not in class, you can’t receive credit, so your participation grade will be affected. I will note your participation (or lack thereof) daily. Thoughtful participation means that you engage critically in our discussions or ask engaging questions about the subject. Simply making quips or responding that you like or dislike something does not warrant thoughtful participation. Doing work for another class or distracting other students will lower your participation grade—even to the point of falling below 15% (meaning, you can have a negative participation grade).

Please see me ASAP if you’re concerned about your participation grade because you’re shy or if you don’t understand these requirements. Telling me at the end of April that you didn’t participate because you’re the quiet type or because you didn’t understand what “thoughtful” meant will be too late. The purpose of discussions is for students to have control over their own learning and to reinforce critical thinking generally and dialogic exchange of ideas specifically. I am willing to provide a quasi-alternative to supplement a student’s participation grade, but please note that discussion, which allows speakers to exchange ideas, is an extremely important component of critical thinking. Alternative assignments are rare and based solely on my discretion.

Canvas Prompts

I will have prompts related to our readings and class discussions. In order to foster your understanding of the course material and theories, I want you to interact with other classmates through writing (we’ll do plenty of speaking in class, but feel free to talk about these ideas with your classmates outside of class). Each week, I’ll ask you to respond to a prompt I provide by Friday at 11:00 pm. Set those weekly reminders now. I’ll have these Discussion prompts on Canvas .

Posting or responding in uncritical ways–ways that don’t rise to the level of a 4000/5000-level course–will affect your grade. So will not responding in at least 250 words. All citations are in addition to the 250-word reflections–no padding your response with long quotations.

What is American Culture? Essay (Final Due 2/17)

As you read and participate in class discussions, consider video games as products of culture. This semester, we’ll identify cultural values and how video games reflect these values. For this essay, you should define American Culture by explaining some prevailing values. How many? It’s not about quantity. You shouldn’t just list or state the values. You must describe (make an argument for) why you feel those values are part of a culture. You could do a fine job on one value, but two or three related values would also be a valid approach. Imagine someone asking you, “what’s the essence of American culture?” This would be your response.

I do not expect you to go into a tremendous amount of technical or historical detail in your essays; instead, try to pick a value that might fit our discussions regarding American values in general. Although we might all agree that a particular value (e.g., individualism) is an American value, you must offer support for such a claim—you can’t just state it.

After you identify and describe the values, you must describe how those values are located or embodied in the American culture. You may use “I” and even bring in personal examples, but you have to defend your reasons for arguing the way you do. Below are the format logistics (I don’t take off for formatting, but I am always asked about formatting so…):

• Typed, double spaced (except heading), 12 pt font
• 1-inch margins all around
• Page numbers (anywhere)
• A title other than “What is American Culture?”
• At least five (5) pages; at least six (6) pages for 5000-level students
• In-text citations: you must use quotations from the course reading and, if you choose, outside reading
• Works Cited/References page (I don’t care which style–MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.–you use for your paper, but please choose one)

Over the course of the semester, the above ideas should make more sense. You’ll have a chance to workshop these essays and revise. Please start thinking about American Culture and identify values. You’ll workshop this on 2/10/2022 (Google Docs) and turn it in via Canvas on 2/17/2022 .

Please don’t email me a draft and say “look at this.” Office hours are Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:00-5:00 pm and by appt (Zoom is preferred). If you’re wondering if one particular value over another would be better suited, please ask, and I’ll offer some advice.

You will need to cite our readings, but I also expect this to have some personality. Late essays will start at 50%.

Video Game Essay (New Due Date: 4/07)

Using a theoretical lens, a blend of lenses, or just a smart perspective you must analyze a video game (or games). You may do a rhetorical analysis where you explain how meaning is conveyed in the game or compare meaning across games. The most straightforward approach is to pick a video game (or related video games) and set out to explain what makes the video game a product of the culture from which it comes.

Alternatively, you could analyze games from one of the analysis types we discussed in Understanding Video Games (Table 1, p. 11)–looking at gaming communities or gamers themselves is appropriate for research. As you know, we focus more on rhetorical and cultural analyses, but there are other analyses you may do. In order not to bite off more than you can chew, I suggest not analyzing gamers playing games. To do such an analysis properly, you would need to interview gamers, record their game play, and transcribe hours of data. You could analyze gaming discussions that you find online or focus on a vlogger’s “walkthrough” of a game (YouTube has 1000s of these). There is plenty of background research—mostly case studies—on video gamers, so, if this is the approach you’d like to do, do your research early.

Remember, you don’t have to have played the game to focus on a segment of the narrative (or game play). YouTube has so much game play recorded, so, if you’re not agile enough to get through a game, you may watch game play and analyze that. Remember, the YouTube video and the video game itself are both cultural products…

Possible Topics

• Cultural Studies: this/these game/s reflect culture–why and how
• Controversies and/or Scapegoating
• Economics: Capitalism, Neoliberalism, eSports, Making money
• Reddit discussions
• Wikis ( Fallout ‘s Nukapedia is one I frequent)
• Gender Analyses
• Graphics and/or technological developments
• How games incorporate pop culture references
• Mini-histories of a genre (war games, adventure games, Zelda, Mario, etc.)
• Nationalism and Propaganda
• Psychoanalysis
• Racial Stereotypes
• Pick a field and an academic journal or two and review the research (a time period could help)
• Popular news reporting on video games (again, a time period would help: 1990s, early 2000s, etc.)
• See Ch. 9 for behavioral psychological meta-analyses

Regardless of your approach, you are not summarizing. You are doing a critical analysis and making sound arguments about the meaning(s) of a game.

These will be workshopped on 3/17 and are due 4/07 on Canvas. Format this the way an essay should be formatted and make sure it is at least 7 pages (9 for 5000-level students) . It requires research outside of the class reading, and you will also need to cite our readings (yes, and readings not assigned), so make sure you do that. If you don’t cite—use in-text citations—any of our readings or outside research, I’ll tell you to do it over. Therefore, your essay will be late, and all late essays start at 50%.

Did I mention that you aren’t supposed to summarize the games: you interpret them or explain their significance culturally, historically, or clinically.

Here are the requirements for your 3/18 * drafts

*Change from the syllabus.

• A title other than “Video Game Essay”
• Page requirements DO NOT include Works Cited or References Sections
• Yes, you must do research. Fortunately, your primary sources (the video game itself, blog/vlog posts, community boards, etc.) count as research!
• For this draft, you can (and should) include sources you don’t cite but possibly will in your final draft.
• Consider this more of a Bibliography

Multimodal Project (Due 4/28-5/09)*

*This is now worth 200 points because I’m combining it with the Final Presentation, so it’s just one assignment.

You have many options for this assignment. Basically, you will make an argument using new media. You have lots of freedom to work with visuals, video, or audio in any way you’d like. Consider creating a project that reflects or is inspired by something from this course. Instead of rigid guidelines, I want you to have plenty of room for experimentation. I’m just looking to see how the course reading inspired you to communicate in a form other than a traditional academic essay. This may (and probably should) be related to your Video Game Essay assignment.

You don’t need to be an editing guru to do this. You can easily create a project using a program like Video Editor, which is a standard program for Microsoft Windows. Using text, images, videos, and F/X, make an argument. I will show you a few examples (I hope), but I’m not concerned with how well-edited this is. I’m concerned with your argument.

You have plenty of possible ways you can do this assignments. A video would be a good choice ( example –way too long for your model). Just make sure I can play the project, and please have citations (URLs and such) for the material you get online. Yes, you MUST cite our readings, so your last frames (or final frames) will have citations from our readings and the material you use from outside of class.

New information on the combined assignments:

• This should be at least 3 minutes and loses it’s potential for quality after 5 minutes.
• Just as you shouldn’t pad your essays with long quotations, don’t allow unnecessarily long videos to pad these projects.
• The goal is to select an appropriate topic (perhaps related to your Video Game Essay) for the time.
• Be creative but don’t worry about technical perfection–I don’t expect you to be professional videographers or seasoned vloggers…remember Frogger (1981) ?
• Don’t forget about the citation requirements: Works Cited or References.

Final Presentation (Due 5/09)

*This is no longer required because it’s combined with the above Multimodal Project.

You will do a 4 to 5-minute presentation on your Multimodal Project. This presentation will be during our Final Exam Time, May 9, 2022 (or uploaded by that date). Don’t go under 4 minutes, and don’t go over 5 minutes. We’ll discuss these projects later in the semester.

Home » Syllabus

2022 Course Schedule

(Syllabus Subject to Revision) All gameplay times offered are estimates based on averages taken from howlongtobeat.com .

The only games you will absolutely have to purchase are Mountain (Mac, PC), We Are Chicago (Mac, PC), There Is No Game (if you have a Mac and no PC access), and Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (Platform of Choice).

Week 1: How to Close Read a Game

Sept 27: Introduction to Critical Videogame Studies: Play Passage or as a backup go to this browser-based version though unfortunately without the soundtrack  (Jason Rohrer, 5 minutes), Hair Nah (Momo Pixel, 5 minutes), and Mountain (David O’Reilly, variable) in advance of the first class period.

Sept 29: “How to do a video game close reading?”: Read “Procedural Rhetoric” (Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games , p. 1-40), “Against Procedurality” (Miguel Sicart, online), and “Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies beyond the Politics of the Image” (Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea Russworm, Gaming Representation , p. 1-9). Play Dys4ia or watch here if you hit a glitch (Anna Anthropy, 7 minutes), Sim Nimby (Owen Weeks and Steve Nass, 2 minutes), and The Uber Game ( The Financial Times , 15-20 minutes).

Sept. 30 (Section): Introductions and Close Readings of Games

Week 2: Genre

Oct. 4: Read “Genre and the Video Game” (Mark J.P. Wolf, p. 113-134) and “Digital Games and Science Fiction” (Patrick Jagoda, p. 139-151)

Oct. 6: Play ONE of the following roguelike/roguelite adjacent games: Hades (Supergiant Games), Dead Cells (Motion Twin), Loop Hero (Four Quarters), Monster Train (Shiny Shoe), OR Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster) for at least 5 hours, and watch short videos of three of the games you did not play. To reiterate, you don’t have to play all of these games, just one.

Oct. 7 (Section): Extended Discussion of Genre and Roguelikes

Week 3: Mechanics

Oct. 10: Play Super Mario Bros. (30 minutes) in the Weston Game Lab “Retro Corner” any time between 11:00am and 6:00pm

Oct. 11: Play Super Mario Bros. (30 minutes) and Braid (Jonathan Blow, 5-6 hours to complete the entire game, but you are only required to finish World 2 and World 3, try one level in each of the worlds, and watch the final level and epilogue on YouTube ). Read “Operational Logics and Playable Models” from How Pac-Man Eats (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, p. 3-15)

Oct. 13: Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 8 hours to complete the entire game, but you are only required to finish approximately 50% for class and watch the ending )

Oct. 14 (Section): Workshop Midterm “Critical Play” Video Essays

Oct. 16 (Sunday): UChicago Game Design RSO Unity Crash Course (optional)

Week 4: Narrative and Space I

Oct. 18: Play Myst: Masterpiece Edition  (Rand and Robyn Miller, 5.5 hours) OR Doom (id Software, 1993, 5 hours). Read “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (Henry Jenkins, online), and “ Doom , Myst , and the War for the Soul of Video Games” (Eric Rosenfield)

Oct. 19: BioShock (Xbox 360) play session in Weston Game Lab (pick one or play at home: 12:30-2:30pm, 3:00-5:00pm, and 5:30-7:30pm)

Oct. 20: Play BioShock (2K Games, play at least 2 hours and watch YouTube video of Frank Fontaine reveal and variable endings ) and read “Theorizing Navigable Space in Video Games” (Mark JP Wolf)

Oct. 21 (Section): Modding exercise: Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Mancala, Up the River

Oct. 22: MIDTERM “CRITICAL PLAY” VIDEO ESSAYS DUE

Week 5: Narrative and Space II

Oct. 25: Play Gone Home (Fullbright, 2 hours) and Curtain (Dreamfeel, 40 minutes). Read “Reaching Toward Home Software Interface as Queer Orientation in the Video Game Curtain” (Whitney Pow, p. 43-56)

Oct. 26: GROUP FINAL PROJECT ABSTRACT DUE

Oct. 27: Play Unpacking (Witch Beam, 3.5 hours)

Oct. 28 (Section): Task management and roles, optimizing the design process

Week 6: Critical Making and Learning Objectives

Nov. 1: Special Session on critical making with Marcel O’Gorman (University of Waterloo and Critical Media Lab), reading TBD

Nov. 3: Special Session on serious games with Ashlyn Sparrow (University of Chicago and Weston Game Lab). Play: We Are Chicago (Culture Shock Games, 2 hours). Watch: “The Danger of a Single Story” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). Read: Game Design Day: read Game Design Workshop (Tracy Fullerton, Chapter 1, “The Role of the Game Designer,” p. 2-21)

Nov. 4 (Section): Working on the Game Design Document

Nov. 6: RETRO VIDEO GAME REVIEW DUE BY TODAY

Week 7: Medium Specificity

Nov. 7: UChicago Game Design RSO Playtest (optional)

Nov. 8: Play The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (Crows Crows Crows, 2-5 hours) and read “Metaproceduralism:  The Stanley Parable  and The Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction”  (Bradley Fest,  Wide Screen , 2016)

Nov. 10: Play There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (Draw Me A Pixel, 5 hours)

Nov. 11 (Section): Final Game Project Working Session

Week 8: Difficulty and Failure

Nov. 14: Difficult game play session (7-9pm)

Nov. 15: Discuss difficult games from shared play session (e.g., Ghost ‘n Goblins , Mega Man II , Dark Souls , Cuphead , etc.) and read “Difficulty” (Patrick Jagoda, p. 191-220)

Nov. 17: SPENT (Urban Ministries of Durham, 15 mins), Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (Pippin Barr, play for 5-10 mins), Queers in Love at the End of the World (Anna Anthropy, 10 seconds), QWOP (Bennett Foddy, 2 minutes), and read “Playing to Lose: Burnout and the Queer Art of Failing at Video Games” (Bo Ruberg, p. 135-157)

Nov. 18 (Section): Playtest Final Projects in Progress

Week 9: R&D (Rest and Development)

NO CLASSES THIS WEEK FROM NOVEMBER 21-27.

Week 10: Number of Players and Course Conclusion

Nov. 28: FINAL PROJECT VIDEO PRESENTATION (GROUP) DUE

Nov. 29: Read “Number of Players” (Clara Fernández-Vara, Introduction to Game Analysis , p. 88-93), “Cooperative Play” (Emma Witkowski, p. 89-96), and Alternate Reality Game videos ( Terrarium and Cene )

Dec. 1: Course Conclusion

Dec 7: FINAL PROJECT (GROUP) AND REFLECTION (INDIVIDUAL) DUE

CLASS EXPECTATIONS

Timely Arrival : We only meet a handful of times throughout the quarter so make the most of each session. Arrive on time!

Attendance : Attendance is required for this course. Students absent for more than one class risk lowering their participation grade; students with more than three unexcused absences will be given a final grade of incomplete or fail. However, if you are experiencing symptoms of illness, do not attend class, following the University of Chicago’s COVID-19 guidelines.

Preparation : Do the reading and take the gameplay seriously. Meaningful discussion depends on your engagement with our core texts and games. All readings and games are to be completed for the date on which they are listed.

Annotations and Notes : Bring your notes and annotated readings to class. You should get into the habit of writing down ideas that will strengthen your participation in our group exchange. Just because we’re discussing digital works, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jot down ideas that will strengthen your participation in our group exchange. These notes may also serve as the starting point for your video essay and final project.

Questions and Office Hours : Always feel free to ask questions either in class or during office hours. A seminar can’t succeed without open discussion and curiosity!

Plagiarism : As the Office of the Vice President and Dean of Students notes, “It is contrary to ethics, to academic integrity, and to the spirit of intellectual inquiry to submit the statements, ideas, or work of others as one’s own. Such conduct is punishable under the University’s disciplinary system.” If you have any doubts about whether something constitutes plagiarism, you should contact me in advance of turning in work with plagiarized content. Academic dishonesty is a very serious offense — even if it is unintentional . The penalty for plagiarism might include both failure on the paper and failure of this course. Please review the University of Chicago’s official policy online. Keep in mind that academic dishonesty includes buying papers online, outsourcing your academic work to someone else (paid or unpaid), and submitting the same paper to more than one course. This is not an exhaustive list of the practices that constitute academic dishonesty and plagiarism. For more details, please consult the discussion of plagiarism and academic honesty in Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success .

Cell Phones and Laptops : Cell phones must absolutely be turned off in class. While laptops are permitted, we recommend that anyone tempted to check in with social media, email, and other sites unrelated to class should stick to pen and paper for note-taking. If you have a compulsion about emailing, messaging, or checking social media during class (and cannot control yourself), you should absolutely refrain from bringing your laptop to class.

Late Assignments and Extensions : If any assignment is late, surpassing the deadline, it will immediately drop half a grade (e.g. from a B to B-). The grade will continue to drop at a comparable increment every 24 hours thereafter. We do grant extensions (especially in cases of major life events or emergencies) but you should talk to us about this possibility well in advance of the deadline.

Student Disability Services : We are committed to meeting the needs of all students. To arrange class-related accommodations, please see Student Disability Services prior to scheduling a meeting with me.

• Attendance, Preparation, and Discussion in Class and Section: 15%
• Blog Posts (4 Entries and Weekly Responses throughout quarter): 15%
• Retro Game Review (Blog post, approximately 750 words): post by November 5: 5%
• Midterm Critical Play Video Essay (approximately 10 minutes): 25%
• Final Group Project: Group Abstract (300-400 words), Group Video Presentation (5-7 minutes), Group Project (variable but substantial), and Individual Reflection (2-3 pages): 40%

ASSIGNMENTS: WRITING AND PRESENTATIONS

Blog posts (4) and responses (weekly).

Over the course of the quarter, you will contribute to a class blog (located on this WordPress site) through original posts and responses to your peers. These posts are intended to influence and extend the conversations we have during our shared meetings. You are required to post at least 4 entries over the course of the quarter . Each entry should respond to that week’s video games or theoretical reading, expand substantively on an ongoing topic of class discussion (without simply reproducing or documenting an exchange), or call our attention to articles or media about related phenomena. The 4 minimum entries can be posted in any week with new content, over the course of the quarter, but you may post no more than one post a week for credit (so plan ahead!). Each post must also comment on a topic from the week in which it is posted (so you can’t, for instance, return to a topic from Week 2 on Week 8 unless it is in some way related to a current discussion). While the content of these entries can be wide-ranging and less formal than your video essay, you should observe formal citation standards and be mindful of your prose. You are also required to read posts by your classmates and respond briefly to at least one entry per week.

Retro Video Game Review (750 words)

As your special fifth blog post, you will write a critical review of a video game that we do not play together for class that was released during the fifth generation of consoles (1993–1998) or earlier. That means you could review a game that can be played for consoles that include the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, or Sega Saturn. Many of these consoles are available for checkout at the Weston Game Lab in the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center, and numerous games are available for checkout at Crerar Library. You are also allowed to play an emulated version from home, for example a version of an older game that you find online or an NES or SNES game available for free on Nintendo Switch Online if you have that console.

Your task with this review is not merely to produce a rhetorical version of a “like” or create a consumer-level review that amounts to a “thumbs up/down.” Instead, we would like you to think about what more intelligent popular short-form writing about video games might look like. How can you use an overview of a game to raise interesting formal, social, and/or political issues? Or how can you elaborate a concept demonstrated by that game? Or does it do something non-obvious relative to genre? You should post your review on the class blog with a format of “Game Review” followed by your game title (e.g., “Game Review: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past ”).

You can post your review any time prior to Week 6 (Deadline: November 6)

Midterm Critical Play Video Essay (approximately 10 minutes in duration)

For your midterm, you’ll perform an extended analysis of any video game that we have covered in class up to that point . As you explore your topic, you may turn to formal approaches as well as a cultural theory or philosophical methodology of your choice. The best analyses will combine 1.) medium-specific and formally-oriented reading practices, 2.) critical theories and methods such as historicism, feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, anthropological ethnography, genre theory, media theory, and/or another approach you’ve learned through your humanities or social science courses, and 3.) a clear definition of a concept that you are exploring and complicating.

Keep in mind that a persuasive analysis of different forms and media requires specific vocabularies and close reading practices proper to the work in question. For example, if you analyze a film, you must attend not only to plot or character development, but also to features such as shot distance, lighting, costume, mise-en-scène, cut type, sound effects, etc. When you think about a video game, on the other hand, you might consider elements including (but not limited to) aesthetic style, interface design, navigability, (non-)interactivity, game mechanics, platform affordances, networked dimensions, and so forth.

Instead of writing a paper, we are asking you to create a short video that includes your own verbal analysis combined with footage of gameplay that you are analyzing. You will receive additional instructions and resources for creating these essays. Samples of published versions of video essays, which analyze video games and film, include:

• Ian Bryce Jones, “Special Effectivities” in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 6.3, 2019.
• Allison de Fren, “ Ex Machina : Questioning the Human Machine,” Vimeo .

We are not expecting video essays of this quality but they can serve as models. Both essays grapple with sophisticated theoretical concepts and questions via close readings and media examples. You might also find it helpful to look at YouTube videos reviews of games that analyze their formal or thematic issues, such as:

• What’s So Great About That?, “ Night In The Woods : Do You Always Have A Choice?,” YouTube , 2017.
• Ben Plays Games, “How Halo Makes Players Despair,” YouTube , 2020.

Note that there are elements of these videos that are appropriate to your videos, but that these are not precise models. The level of analysis in your videos should be directed not toward a generalist audience (as these videos are) but toward an audience familiar with the kinds of game studies frameworks and analytical categories you’ve been studying in this course. Your video essay should introduce your game, include a close reading, develop an argument, and foreground implications (the “So what?” of your argument). In addition to footage from your primary game case, you can include footage of other games if they serve your argument.

FINAL GROUP PROJECT ASSIGNMENTS

Final group project (variable length).

Collaboration is an increasingly vital skill in a cultural landscape dominated by digital technologies. While novels and poems are often written by individual authors, most videogames depend on partnerships among writers, artists, programmers, and designers.

For your final project, you will NOT write a traditional research paper, even as there will be an analytical dimension to your work. Instead, you will create a pre-approved creative project (which can take numerous forms) in assigned groups of approximately 4 team members each. Options might include a text adventure, a Twine game, a visual novel, an art game, a serious or educational game, a Game Design Document for a larger-scale project such as an Alternate Reality Game, a Machinima film, a game-oriented website, or a piece of interactive scholarship (in the style of journals such as Thresholds, Kairos , or Vectors ). To produce your work, you might consider turning to software such as WordPress, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Twine, Unity, Ren’Py, etc. In order to create a compelling digital work, you need NOT have substantial or indeed any technical knowledge . We are interested not only in the creativity of your project but also the quality of the associated writing and your engagement with theoretical concepts we have been exploring throughout the quarter.

We are adding two primary creative constraints to this final projects.

First, you should focus on 2D or multimedia games, and not on 3D games created in something like Unreal Game Engine, which would be too time-intensive relative to the amount of time you have in this course, and would shift you too much from game design and experimental making toward game development .

Second, your game or game-related project should in some way operate within the broad theme of “Apocalypse.” We will elaborate on this open-ended category, but it can related to a range of topics including the end of the world or the unfolding of a new world; post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or utopian genres; movement from apocalyptic events to mundane apocalyptic atmospheres; interpretations linked to the etymology of the word “apocalypse” that signals “revelation” or “uncovering”; or exploration of particular apocalypses linked to climate change, nuclear disaster, overpopulation, pandemics, AI uprisings, or alien invasions.

Rather than a complete departure from academic work and game theory, we would like you to engage in a process of what Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire have called “theory by design.” In other words, instead of working through ideas in an expository fashion, you will do so through creative development. While we are not specifying a set quantity or size for your game or media project, the effort and production should be substantial.

Final Group Project Abstract

As a group, write a brief abstract for your final project that is due approximately a month before the project deadline. In this abstract, you should include several points, in bullet points:

• Offer an overview “elevator pitch” of your project.
• Describe the genre of your project and how it complicates or responds to its genre category in a meaningful way.
• Offer an overview of your narrative or non-narrative scenario
• Describe your core mechanics or gameplay interactions.
• Describe the type of research, technical knowledge, and artistic skills that will be necessary to complete your work in the final weeks of the quarter.
• Describe the division of labor within your group.
• Describe what your project might teach the players. That is, what is the “So what?” of your game beyond entertainment of engagement.

You can adjust all of the above as you continue, but it’s useful to have a starting point, well in advance of the deadline. For groups that take a more creative route, you may also find it useful to write a brief outline of your narrative or description of your interface and core gameplay. For groups that take a more academic route, you might include an initial bibliography of additional readings.

Final Project Pitch (5-7 minute video)

During the final week of the class, as a group, you will hand in a roughly 5-7-minute video that introduces your final project. This assignment will allow you to present the features of your project in a clear and persuasive manner. The video should combine your group members speaking, alongside screenshots, gameplay video, or visual aids (e.g., PowerPoint slides) that convey your concept. Your project does NOT need to be completed, at this stage, but a mockup or selections from the final piece may help. This will be your last opportunity to receive feedback prior to turning in the final project.

Artist Statement (variable)

Along with your creative project, you should submit a collaborative artist statement that summarizes your work and elaborates on its significance. We will discuss what goes into an artist statement prior to your submission. For substantial and playable game projects, this statement need not be longer than a page or even a short paragraph. But think of this as your public advocacy on behalf of what your project does successfully.

Individual Reflection (2 pages)

Along with your actual group project, we would like each of you to turn in a brief (2 pages) individual reflection about your project. Here, you should comment on the collaborative experience. Collaboration is a difficult process but it can produce astonishing results. In writing this response, consider the following questions: What was it like working with peers from other disciplines? What were the benefits and challenges of collaborating on this kind of design project? What did you contribute to the group? What was the balance of work like in your group? What do you think you accomplished as a team?

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• 2022 Syllabus
• Critical Play Videos
• Syllabus 2021

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Course info.

• Clara Fernandez-Vara

Departments

• Comparative Media Studies/Writing

As Taught In

• Game Design
• Digital Media

Learning Resource Types

Introduction to videogame studies, game analysis guidelines.

This is a list of general guidelines to analyze a videogame or a specific segment of it. It includes guidelines on playing the game, types of analysis, contextualization, preparing an overview, formal elements, and conclusions.

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Assignment: Video Game Product Proposal and Presentation

Randy Nichols, University of Washington, Tacoma

The exercise included is the final assignment for my course on the video games industry. It asks students to make use of the various readings and industry sources focused on questions of diversity and differences in media markets in order to create a proposal for a new video game related product. The chief goal is to have students think about the viability for a product which addresses areas the industry struggles with in terms of diversity, audience differences, accessibility issues, employment, etc. The project asks them to model their paper and presentation on a video game design document so that they’re also learning about that genre of writing. Similar assignments can be used in other media industry courses.

Download a PDF of the assignment here: Nichols Video Game Proposal

And a Word version here: Nichols video game proposal

Keywords:   game design , media industry , proposal , video game

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