Thanks to the wonderful folks at the UConn Center for Continuing Studies, we've got a very nice gateway into the first tangible effort of the Video Games and Human Values Initiative, my short course in January 2009 for teachers, parents, and anyone else who's interested, "Living Epic: The Power of Video Games in Culture from the Ancient to Modern World." Suitable for a virtual stocking stuffer, this course will be, above all, a great way for us to start reaching an audience of teachers who want to think about the educational potential of games in a new way.
To be completely clear, here's where you register.
The initiative itself now has a spiffy new Ning social network. I beseech you, if you like what we're up to, to head over, join up, and start talking about the future of this conversation. Most importantly, we're starting to talk about the proto-symposium, "Defining Play," inspired by the wonderful work of Corvus Elrod.
Showing posts with label Center for Video Games and Human Values. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Center for Video Games and Human Values. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Notes from the Spice Mines of Kessel
Apologies for the darkness of Living Epic over the past few weeks. As you’ll gather from the notes below, I’ve been busy not just with my ordinary teaching duties (this semester that’s Greek Civilization, Intermediate Latin, Plato-as-practice, and Plato’s Phaedrus with my advanced Greek students [even more glorious, and even more sexy, in the original]), but also more importantly with the center.
Now that our first grant proposal is in, and I have a better feel for how the whole “You know, you really should give me all your money” game, I’ll be trying to get back on the blog, though I suspect for a while it’s going to be an echo-chamber sort of thing: I’ve got an incredible back-log now of amazingly smart things people like Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Corvus Elrod, Steve Gaynor, and Duncan Fyfe have said that I want to comment on, however briefly. Since I’ll be starting to develop the materials for the courses now, also, I’ll be able to post about that, too.
Anyway, the first grant proposal, for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant, was uploaded yesterday. I’ve posted the narrative on the wiki, here. Comments on it are beyond welcome--I would upload my firstborn if I thought it could get a conversation started that would improve the center's self-formulations.
Next up is the Macarthur foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, due in a week. The money would go to making our own persistent world with Sun’s Project Wonderland resources, and to giving out our first fellowships. In turn, that would mean we could do our first real symposium, and publish the proceedings. It’s all happening, maybe!
I’m giving a lecture, in the fun UConn Honors Last Lecture series, next week called “Bioshock in Plato’s Cave: How Video Games Can Lead Us into the Light.” Two weeks later I’m doing a scholarly luncheon talk at the UConn Humanities Institute called “End-Game Gear and the Multiplayer Epic from the Iliad to World of Warcraft,” which is pretty much an academic version of “Achilles’ Phat Lewtz,” which in turn is the prelude to what I hope will be my first peer-reviewable classics ‘n’ gaming article.
Finally, we’re getting very close to registration for the courses in January and the spring semester. I’ll post again with the relevant links soon!
Now that our first grant proposal is in, and I have a better feel for how the whole “You know, you really should give me all your money” game, I’ll be trying to get back on the blog, though I suspect for a while it’s going to be an echo-chamber sort of thing: I’ve got an incredible back-log now of amazingly smart things people like Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Corvus Elrod, Steve Gaynor, and Duncan Fyfe have said that I want to comment on, however briefly. Since I’ll be starting to develop the materials for the courses now, also, I’ll be able to post about that, too.
Anyway, the first grant proposal, for a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up grant, was uploaded yesterday. I’ve posted the narrative on the wiki, here. Comments on it are beyond welcome--I would upload my firstborn if I thought it could get a conversation started that would improve the center's self-formulations.
Next up is the Macarthur foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, due in a week. The money would go to making our own persistent world with Sun’s Project Wonderland resources, and to giving out our first fellowships. In turn, that would mean we could do our first real symposium, and publish the proceedings. It’s all happening, maybe!
I’m giving a lecture, in the fun UConn Honors Last Lecture series, next week called “Bioshock in Plato’s Cave: How Video Games Can Lead Us into the Light.” Two weeks later I’m doing a scholarly luncheon talk at the UConn Humanities Institute called “End-Game Gear and the Multiplayer Epic from the Iliad to World of Warcraft,” which is pretty much an academic version of “Achilles’ Phat Lewtz,” which in turn is the prelude to what I hope will be my first peer-reviewable classics ‘n’ gaming article.
Finally, we’re getting very close to registration for the courses in January and the spring semester. I’ll post again with the relevant links soon!
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Achilles' phat lewtz
A fun version of some of the stuff I've been talking about in the Living Epic Main Quest came out today in the Escapist.
While I'm posting, I should apologize for not posting over the past few weeks--between teaching and the exciting-but-oh-so-time-consuming labor of synthesizing the Center for Video Games and Human Values from hydrogen, I haven't been able to formulate a post that I'd want anyone to read.
But things are certainly proceeding nicely both towards the courses in Winter and Spring and towards the rising of the center from the fertile imaginations of so many amazing people with their different approaches to games-and-culture. As always, more to come!
While I'm posting, I should apologize for not posting over the past few weeks--between teaching and the exciting-but-oh-so-time-consuming labor of synthesizing the Center for Video Games and Human Values from hydrogen, I haven't been able to formulate a post that I'd want anyone to read.
But things are certainly proceeding nicely both towards the courses in Winter and Spring and towards the rising of the center from the fertile imaginations of so many amazing people with their different approaches to games-and-culture. As always, more to come!
Friday, July 18, 2008
CVGHV Classroom 2.0 group
I've created a group in Classroom 2.0, a Ning network, for the Center for Video Games and Human Values, here. With any luck, we'll be able to get our virtual community up and running there, before moving it to what will probably be its ultimate home on a UConn server. I'd love to welcome any interested readers of this blog to that group. E-mail me at amphiaraus@msn.com if you'd like an invite.
For more about the center, see here!
For more about the center, see here!
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Center for Video Games and Human Values
The Center for Video Games and Human Values, based at the University of Connecticut, serves as an interdisciplinary nexus for online courses and online scholarly activities like symposia and research fellowships. All these activities are designed to advance our understanding of how video games and their culture can shape our values constructively for the enrichment of society.
I will offer the center's pilot courses, "Living Epic" (a short course for high school teachers and parents) and "Gaming Homer" (an undergraduate credit course) in the winter and spring of 2009. For more information on the courses, click through the links below or contact me at amphiaraus@msn.com
Click through these links to get involved in the center!: Since my friend Michael Abbott is at the Games, Learning, and Society conference this weekend, and has just put up a remarkable post announcing the revolution that’s emerging from the work of James Paul Gee, and since there’s also a story in the New York Times today about how the price of fuel is creating a tipping point for online college education, it seems a felicitous moment to make a relatively formal announcement about what I’ve been putting nearly all my energy into for the last few months.
As a medium that embraces the humanities and social sciences, technology, and the worlds of business and education, video games demand analysis from multiple angles and on multiple levels. We believe that video games have grown to extraordinary cultural prominence without benefit of such a truly interdisciplinary analysis; in particular, video games are a dominant cultural force among students now in the midst of their secondary and post-secondary education, only a few of whose teachers have any understanding of how gaming is shaping their students.
To meet the need for such analysis, the center will offer a slate of online courses aimed at several inter-related groups: high school teachers and parents, and their advanced students, undergraduates in various disciplines, and interested people in the gaming culture, all of whom share a fundamental interest in ensuring that video gaming both increasingly earns the societal respect it deserves and increasingly deserves that respect. In order to address video games in their broad effect on culture and to engage gamers in its discussions, the center will advocate an approach that addresses popular and ambitious games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft, demonstrating for example on the one hand their cultural relationship to Homeric epic and on the other their educational relationship to the way students who play them learn.
The center’s first course will be a two-week online short course for high school teachers and parents in January of 2009, called “Living Epic: Video Games and the Epic Tradition.” An undergraduate credit course, CAMS 3208, will follow in the spring semester, and the center’s first full year of operation will begin in the fall semester of 2009 with several courses offered by the first fellows of the center. My colleagues in this endeavor include Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard, the author of Quests, and if we can make our schedules come out right, Michael and Jeff will offer two of our first courses.
These courses will involve in-game class work, in the form of in-game laboratories and in-game discussions; they will also involve contacts with the people who are creating the games we explore and analyze. To that end, the center is already forming partnerships with developers and publishers; these partnerships will be announced as the kick-off date of the pilot course approaches.
At the same time, the center will provide a (virtual) place for scholarly research and discussion about the relation of video games to values. Fellowships from the center will support individual research projects at the intersection of video gaming and scholars’ own disciplines, while the interdisciplinary nature of the center will provide extraordinary opportunities to strengthen those projects through the cross-fertilization of ideas from other fields. An ongoing virtual symposium, with a guest symposiast from a field such as game development or game journalism, on a topic like “Immersion” or “Character in Games,” will involve contributions from the fellows, their students, and the center’s alumni; the proceedings of this symposium will be compiled and published once a year.
We believe that video games’ greatest innovations in education, business, the social sciences, the humanities, and most of all in games themselves will arise from a deeper understanding of games’ connections among all these disciplines. When scholars and students alike understand these connections better, they will be better prepared to advance the state of gaming as it relates to their own fields.
The center will exist almost entirely online, and we hope to make that online existence at once a place to gather a community of learning and a laboratory for the study of what games are and can be. Using open-source tools like those from Sun Microsystem’s Projects Wonderland and Darkstar, we will create and then build-up a virtual center that will serve as the focus for a growing community of fellows, students, and alumni, to carry on the center’s work of learning both through online teaching and through online discussion.
If you’re interested in enrolling in the center’s course offerings, or want to inquire about applying for one of the center’s first fellowships, please make contact with me at amphiaraus@msn.com. The details of the fellowships in particular are still coming together, and there’s a great deal of room for innovative ideas in how they might work. A formal fellowship application, on the other hand, will probably be available in January.
I will offer the center's pilot courses, "Living Epic" (a short course for high school teachers and parents) and "Gaming Homer" (an undergraduate credit course) in the winter and spring of 2009. For more information on the courses, click through the links below or contact me at amphiaraus@msn.com
Click through these links to get involved in the center!: Since my friend Michael Abbott is at the Games, Learning, and Society conference this weekend, and has just put up a remarkable post announcing the revolution that’s emerging from the work of James Paul Gee, and since there’s also a story in the New York Times today about how the price of fuel is creating a tipping point for online college education, it seems a felicitous moment to make a relatively formal announcement about what I’ve been putting nearly all my energy into for the last few months.
As a medium that embraces the humanities and social sciences, technology, and the worlds of business and education, video games demand analysis from multiple angles and on multiple levels. We believe that video games have grown to extraordinary cultural prominence without benefit of such a truly interdisciplinary analysis; in particular, video games are a dominant cultural force among students now in the midst of their secondary and post-secondary education, only a few of whose teachers have any understanding of how gaming is shaping their students.
To meet the need for such analysis, the center will offer a slate of online courses aimed at several inter-related groups: high school teachers and parents, and their advanced students, undergraduates in various disciplines, and interested people in the gaming culture, all of whom share a fundamental interest in ensuring that video gaming both increasingly earns the societal respect it deserves and increasingly deserves that respect. In order to address video games in their broad effect on culture and to engage gamers in its discussions, the center will advocate an approach that addresses popular and ambitious games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft, demonstrating for example on the one hand their cultural relationship to Homeric epic and on the other their educational relationship to the way students who play them learn.
The center’s first course will be a two-week online short course for high school teachers and parents in January of 2009, called “Living Epic: Video Games and the Epic Tradition.” An undergraduate credit course, CAMS 3208, will follow in the spring semester, and the center’s first full year of operation will begin in the fall semester of 2009 with several courses offered by the first fellows of the center. My colleagues in this endeavor include Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard, the author of Quests, and if we can make our schedules come out right, Michael and Jeff will offer two of our first courses.
These courses will involve in-game class work, in the form of in-game laboratories and in-game discussions; they will also involve contacts with the people who are creating the games we explore and analyze. To that end, the center is already forming partnerships with developers and publishers; these partnerships will be announced as the kick-off date of the pilot course approaches.
At the same time, the center will provide a (virtual) place for scholarly research and discussion about the relation of video games to values. Fellowships from the center will support individual research projects at the intersection of video gaming and scholars’ own disciplines, while the interdisciplinary nature of the center will provide extraordinary opportunities to strengthen those projects through the cross-fertilization of ideas from other fields. An ongoing virtual symposium, with a guest symposiast from a field such as game development or game journalism, on a topic like “Immersion” or “Character in Games,” will involve contributions from the fellows, their students, and the center’s alumni; the proceedings of this symposium will be compiled and published once a year.
We believe that video games’ greatest innovations in education, business, the social sciences, the humanities, and most of all in games themselves will arise from a deeper understanding of games’ connections among all these disciplines. When scholars and students alike understand these connections better, they will be better prepared to advance the state of gaming as it relates to their own fields.
The center will exist almost entirely online, and we hope to make that online existence at once a place to gather a community of learning and a laboratory for the study of what games are and can be. Using open-source tools like those from Sun Microsystem’s Projects Wonderland and Darkstar, we will create and then build-up a virtual center that will serve as the focus for a growing community of fellows, students, and alumni, to carry on the center’s work of learning both through online teaching and through online discussion.
If you’re interested in enrolling in the center’s course offerings, or want to inquire about applying for one of the center’s first fellowships, please make contact with me at amphiaraus@msn.com. The details of the fellowships in particular are still coming together, and there’s a great deal of room for innovative ideas in how they might work. A formal fellowship application, on the other hand, will probably be available in January.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
(Gaming) Homer Course-design (3): Units (syllabus, more or less)
This is a post in a series taken from the preliminary version of the course-design document for CAMS 3208. Dig in and see what you think! Please do let me know if you’ve got suggestions for other activities, or if you think anything needs clarification. I really want this course to be something gamers with the slightest interest in the ancient world, and classicists with the slightest interest in gaming, are drooling to take. :D
At some point, probably in January, I'll post the actual syllabus for the course, but the following is pretty close to what it's going to be. If you're feeling really clicky, you can correlate the letters A-E in parentheses with the goals and objectives in the first post in the series, and the readings with the list of activities in the second. Think of it as a game! ;-)
Unit 1. The bardic occasion, then and now (A, B) (3 weeks)
At some point, probably in January, I'll post the actual syllabus for the course, but the following is pretty close to what it's going to be. If you're feeling really clicky, you can correlate the letters A-E in parentheses with the goals and objectives in the first post in the series, and the readings with the list of activities in the second. Think of it as a game! ;-)
Unit 1. The bardic occasion, then and now (A, B) (3 weeks)
- Activities: (reading) Iliad 2, Odyssey 8-9, Lord, Singer of Tales; (gaming) Play a level or quest three times, preferably in co-op; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions for developers.
- Sub-objectives: 1) describe the bardic occasion; 2) summarize oral formulaic theory; 3) produce a report of a gaming session as a bardic occasion.
Unit 2. The Aristeia and levelling (A, B, C, D) (2 weeks)
- Activities: (reading) comparison of aristeiai, Nagy, Homeric Questions; (playing) level an RPG hero; (discussion) in-game discussion; conduct and analyze interview; proxy visit to MMO developer studio.
- Sub-objectives: 1) describe the practice of the aristeia, with examples from Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame aristeia, with reference to ancient material.
Unit 3. Gear (B, C, D, E) (2 weeks)
- Activities: (reading) Iliad 18, Selected passages; (gaming) Equip Master Chief correctly for the situation, gain gear for an RPG character; (discussion) in-game discussion.
- Sub-objectives: 1) describe the function of arms and armor in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report of a videogame despoiling and resulting combat, with reference to ancient material
sub-obejctive; 3) produce a report of RPG gear aggregation, with reference to ancient material.
Unit 4. Ethical critique (C, D, E) (2 weeks)
- Activities: (reading) Iliad 9, 24; Odyssey 11, 22; Nagy; (gaming) play an RPG scenario light and dark; play Halo “save the marines” moment; (discussion) in-game discussion; develop interview questions, conduct and analyze interview.
- Sub-objectives: 1:) descibe the ethical critiques mounted by the Iliad and the Odyssey; 2) describe a potential affordance of videogames for ethical critique; 3) produce a report on an experience of an ethical videogame situation, with reference to ancient material.
Unit 5. Minigames (C, D, E) (1 week)
- Activities: (reading) Iliad 23, Odyssey 8; Nagy; (gaming) Lego Star Wars; (discussion)in-game discussion.
- Sub-objectives: 1) describe the functioning of embedded harmonizing reprsentations like funeral games in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of a harmonizing minigame with reference to ancient material.
Unit 6. Psychology/Sociology of Epic (C, D, E) (1 week)
- Activities: (reading) Iliad 20, Odyssey 23; (gaming) Halo 2 Arbiter level; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) forum discussion.
- Sub-objective: 1) describe the psychological model proposed by the Homeric epics; 2) describe the pscyhological model proposed by an adventure videogame, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on observations of psychology and/or sociology in a gaming community, with reference to ancient material.
Unit 7. Anti-heroism (C, D, E) (1 week)
- Activities: (reading) Odyssey 11, Iliad 22; (gaming) Grand Theft Auto series; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion.
- Sub-objective: 1) describe the figure of the anti-hero in Homeric epic; 2) produce a report on an experience of playing as an anti-hero, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a report on anti-heroic behavior on a gaming community forum, with reference to ancient material.
Unit 8. Community and Polis (A, C, D, E) (2 weeks)
- Activities: (reading) Odyssey 9; Plato Apology and selections from Republic, selections from Herodotus and Thucydides; Nagy; (culture) forum observation; (discussion) in-game discussion; design, conduct, analyze developer-community-manager interview.
- Sub-objectives: 1) describe the role of Homeric epic in the rise of the Greek polis in the 7th and 6th Centuries BCE; 2) produce a report on findings about the role of community in gaming culture, with reference to ancient material; 3) produce a speculative report on the affordances of adventure videogames for community-building in the modern world, wirh reference to ancient material.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Quibus lusoribus bono?
My provocation of the field of game studies and its practitioners has appeared today in The Escapist. My heart quails a bit at facing the consequences of this kind of piece, but while I admit some hyperbole in the cause of getting a conversation going, I stand by my central point, that the attempt to marry game criticism to game design is not a good idea.
At any rate, I'm in the process of trying very hard to put other people's money where my mouth is, and thereby to keep that mouth flapping. This is as good a time as any to announce that there's a Center for Video Games and Human Values in the works, for which my course "(Gaming) Homer" is actually the pilot. The center will be based at UConn, but its true existence will be entirely online, and it will include scholars of game studies, should they want to participate, alongside a truly interdisciplinary mix of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Education, and Business.
I'm pleased to say that Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard are my extramural collaborators on this project. I'm hoping they'll keep me from saying anything quite so provocative in the future, since they're much more sanguine about game studies than I am!
At any rate, I'm in the process of trying very hard to put other people's money where my mouth is, and thereby to keep that mouth flapping. This is as good a time as any to announce that there's a Center for Video Games and Human Values in the works, for which my course "(Gaming) Homer" is actually the pilot. The center will be based at UConn, but its true existence will be entirely online, and it will include scholars of game studies, should they want to participate, alongside a truly interdisciplinary mix of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Education, and Business.
I'm pleased to say that Michael Abbott and Jeff Howard are my extramural collaborators on this project. I'm hoping they'll keep me from saying anything quite so provocative in the future, since they're much more sanguine about game studies than I am!
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