Game Design/Game Studies College Courses

[captainhavoc]

Kinda curious how many people out there are taking, or have taken, video game related college courses. Also, if you did, did you have to read Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens? My Video Game Narratives professor (who's actually worked on some pretty high profile games) made us read it and said that it was THE book that everyone in the game design industry reads.

[dsheinem]

I'd love to teach a course in Games and Culture, and hope to at some point in the future, but that wouldn't really be a class directed towards people interested in working on games/in the industry (though it would probably be interesting for them). As is, I probably spend 3-4 class sessions a year discussing games and have had several students write very interesting papers analyzing games and/or their cultural impact.

That said, I have heard good things about Homo Ludens but haven't read it myself (thanks for the reminder!). I'd recommend any of Ian Bogost's work as well, and McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory is also very interesting and accessible. Those are all good starting places to think about Game Studies, even if that's slightly off of what you are referring to (I think).

Also: viewtopic.php?f=45&t=22885

[captainhavoc]

Oh, I almost forgot, in addition to stuff like Homo Ludens, we also watched the Akira Kurosawa film "Rashomon," to get a grasp on story structure and how it might be put to work in a video game. I was pretty surprised that my professor has us studying all this stuff from the 50's in a video game narrative class.