Week Fourteen: Long Form Television

In our final conversation for the semester we will talk about long form television and the movement away from broadcast models of content delivery toward more distributed and individualized models. Students should come prepared to discuss their favorite long form television series and the effects of these changes in serialization on content and audience, especially binge watching. In class we will consider some early long form television like The Prisoner and more recent and historical variations like Dr. Who. We will consider what we behold and the inventory of the effects it has on us. 

This is our last full-class meeting for the semester and I will try to summarize some of what we have covered during this semester with an attempt at a final overview. Be sure to fill out the online course evaluation and as well as to get an appointment time for our grade review next week.

Week Thirteen: Remix Culture

Remix Culture Diagram by Ryan Shaw

This week we will have a guest lecturer, Dr. Danielle Rich, who will talk about Remix Culture. I am asking each of you to come with an example of remix culture mounted on your blog. We will also complete the online course evaluations and prepare for the appointments during the final week. We will discuss in the group the criteria for the final grade. In class movie: Pitch Perfect.

Week Eleven: Literature and Gaming

Sceen shot from Heavy Rain

This week we are considering gaming narrative and whether or not the narrative experience of gaming might be considered a literary experience and thus whether games might be/become literature.

Your assignment this week is to read, You,  a new novel by the game designer, Austin Grossman. The events of the novel unfold over a background of a history of electronic games. The protagonist undertakes a quest that has him playing through games from the earliest computer games to games resembling those of the present generation. We will discuss the novel in class.

Also in class we will consider any games you think might be offer a literary experience. Here are some additional resources for our discussion. 

Play Everybody Dies by Jim Munroe

Play Shade by Andrew Plotkin

Game Studies an Online Journal

"Perspectives of Computer Game Philology"

Week Ten: Twenty-First Century Literature

Todd James Pierce

This week we will be considering three short stories. We will be reading two stories before class, one by Pierce called Colombine: The Musical and one chosen by Pierce to be read by our class called The Beauty Treatment by Stacey Richter from her collection My Date With Satan. In class we will read and discuss together another story by Pierce called Newsworld.  Copies of these stories are currently available on the course resource page.

Todd James Pierce is a novelist and short story writer known especially for his 2006 collection, Newsworld. He is a graduate of the MFA program and the University of California at Irvine and the Ph.D. program at Florida State University. He creative writing at California Polytechnic State University. He is currently working on a lengthy work of non-fiction recounting the history of the men and women who built the new generation of American theme parks in the 1950s. We will discuss some of this work in the second half of our class. Pierce will be talking about this history as well as showing rare footage of animators and park designers from this period in his on-campus talk Wednesday evening in the Academic Center Auditorium.

Next week the featured work is the novel You by the novelist and game designer Austin Grossman. The novel unfolds in a retrospective history of electronic gaming.