The third module of the course focuses on electronic and digital games. We will discuss and analyze games from perspectives such as technical platforms, genre, style, characters, world-building.

See the separate pages for information regarding Assignment 3.

Learning objectives

Use academic game terms to describe digital and electronic games
Analyze how games are defined by technological affordances and constraints
Make use of and combine theoretical concepts of time, space, genre, aestethics, fiction and gender

Schedule overview

Here is an overview of the schedule for this module. The full schedule, with actual times, is available in TimeEdit. (In the case of any conflicting information, trust Canvas.)

The Read Ahead section lists literature which will benefit you if you have read them before the session/lecture. This does not indicate that these are more important than the rest of the literature. They simply introduce or discuss concepts which will improve your intake of the session/lecture.

Date	Type	Title	Read ahead
Mon 27 Sep 08.15-12.00	Lecture (Zoom link)	Media Perspectives Through Video Games
Mon 27 Sep 13.15-17.00	Supervision (Zoom link)
Wed 29 Sep 13.15-17.00	Supervision (Zoom link)
Fri 1 Oct 13.15-17.00	Lecture (Zoom link)	Games, Story, Plot and Meaning
Mon 4 Oct 13.15-17.00	Supervision (Zoom link)
Wed 6 Oct 13.15-17.00	Supervision (Zoom link)
Fri 8 Oct 08.15-12.00	Supervision (new Zoom link)

Websites to play emulated old PC, console, or arcade Games

To help you find older games, here are two links to where you can play old games emulated in a web browser:

Arcade Games

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade (Links to an external site.)

PC & C64 Games

https://classicreload.com/ (Links to an external site.)

For a "top 10" list of PC games (not the C64 games, etc.), see: https://classicreload.com/top

Commodore Amiga

The Internet Archive is a massive repository of playable images of Amiga games (and other systems). You can get to the list here:

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga_games?query=&sin=&sort=titleSorter

Highly influential Amiga games include: Lemmings, Sensible World of Soccer, Turrican, Pinball Fantasies, Xenon 2, The Secret of Monkey Island, Another World, Speedball 2, IK+, Syndicate, Dune 2.

Literature

In this module, the relevance of specific course literature will vary greatly depending on the games you choose to write about. As such, we recommend that you begin by reading their abstracts and scanning them quickly to determine how well it suits what you are writing, and focus on those that support your writing rather than reading all of them. Also consider asking us teachers for potential recommendations of other resources that might suit your writing.

Note that games that are part of assignment 3 (as well as other games) should be treated as reference sources in the assignment in addition to more traditional sources. You should also make use of relevant sources from earlier modules so consider all previous literature list in the course as well as the one below.

Arsenault, Dominic and Larochelle, Audrey. From Euclidian Space to Albertian Gaze: Traditions of Visual Representation in Games Beyond the Surface. Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies. 2014. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/from-euclidean-space-to-albertian-gaze-traditions-of-visual-representation-in-games-beyond-the-surface/ (Links to an external site.)
Gazzard, Alison. Unlocking the Gameworld: The Rewards of Space and Time in Videogames. Game Studies, Volume 11 Issue 1 2011. http://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/gazzard_alison (Links to an external site.)
Heron, M. Inaccessible through Oversight. The need for inclusive game design. The Computer Games Journal. Volume 1 Issue 1. 2012. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03392326
Heron, M & Belford, P. 2014. Sexism in the circuitry: female participation in male-dominated popular computer culture. Computers and Society. Volume 33 Issue 4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273380061_Sexism_in_the_circuitry_female_participation_in_male-dominated_popular_computer_culture
Heron, M. Pacman's Canon in C#. A Quantum Interpretation of Video Game Canon. The Computer Games Journal. Volume 6 Issue 3. 2017. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40869-017-0036-5
Heron, M & Belford, P. 2015. "All of your Co-Workers are Gone: Story, Substance and the Empathic Puzzler". Journal of Games Criticism 2 (1). http://gamescriticism.org/articles/heronbelford-2-1/
Linderoth, J. (2012). The Effort of Being in a Fictional World: Upkeyings and Laminated Frames in MMORPGs. Symbolic Interaction, 35(4), 474-492.
- Now read the parts you didn't read in Module 2
MacCallum-Stewart, Esther. “Take That, Bitches!” Refiguring Lara Croft in Feminist Game Narratives. Game Studies, Volume 14 Issue 2 2014. http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/maccallumstewart (Links to an external site.)
Nitsche, M. (2008). Combining Interaction and Narrative, chapter 5 in Video Game Spaces : Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds, MIT Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central. $CANVAS_COURSE_REFERENCE$/file_ref/gc54781885aa33a3677691eab9cf6f456
Vella, Daniel. Modelling the Semiotic Structure of Game Characters. Proceedings of DiGRA 2014: <Verb that ends in ‘ing’> the <noun> of Game <plural noun>. 2014. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/modeling-the-semiotic-structure-of-game-characters/

Extra material

For those writing about First Person Shooter games, this can be a relevant reference:

Therrien, Carl. Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First Person Shooter Genre. Game Studies, Volume 15 Issue 2 2015. http://gamestudies.org/1502/articles/therrien (Links to an external site.

Below are some interesting documentaries regarding games.

Netflix documentary series High Score about the history of digital games. https://www.netflix.com/title/81019087
Atari Game Over (2014) Full movie Documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8XrM58qO0M
Video Games: The Movie. Full movie documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ryn7qm3CvI
Det Svenska Spelundret ("The Swedish Game Miracle"), a Swedish [in Swedish] documentary about the Swedish Game Industry. https://www.svtplay.se/video/32204943/det-svenska-spelundret
Hades: Developing Hell. Documentary series by Noclip. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-THgg8QnvU4JEVov1tMlFThNYS92F8uC
Telltale: The Human Stories Behind Games. Noclip documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-2nNksMBpg