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About Garrison LeMastersCCTP680 Videogames in Critical Contexts
The rapid advent of digital games in a networked environment is quickly eroding the previously sacred boundary between games and the real. Students are learning from historical simulations; entrepreneurs are earning real money by exploiting virtual labor; the military is recruiting via first person shooters; politicians are campaigning in virtual worlds; and newspapers are publishing games as online op-eds. Concepts like “gamification,” “serious games,” and “funware” are popular topics from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley.
In this course, we will explore videogames across various critical contexts — education, sociality, the economy, government, and more — in order to consider issues raised by this increasingly pervasive technology: What is the nature of procedural rhetoric? What are the prospects for liminal ICT work? How shall we govern virtual states?
At the same time, we will reflect upon the methods, politics, disciplines, and philosophies arrayed in the study of this technology in order to think about knowledge in the culture of computation.
