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MUGC 4890:501 (undergraduate) MUGC 5890: 501 (graduate) Video Games: Behind
the Screens
MTWRF 10:00 to 12:50 p.m. May 16 to June 2, 2016
UNT New College Room 121, Frisco
Instructor: Dr. David Bard-Schwarz
Office: MU 104
E-mail: [email protected]
Description
In this course, we will play, study, and theorize six video games in depth: realMyst 2.0.0 (Mac
App Store), Limbo (playdead.com/store),Braid (Mac App Store), Soundtrack Edition: Fez (store
steampowered.com/app/224760), Monument Valley (iPHONE / iPAD App store), and Blindscape
(iPHONE / iPAD App store). Special thanks to composer Dan Tramte who recommended several
of these games to me.
Students should know right away that we will not be studying games that involve violent
sexuality, military aggression, or gender-based exploitation on any level. There is an immense
industry of video games in the west whose structure, imagery, narrative, interactive
component, sound, music, and ideological underpinnings rely on these forces. It is possible and
perhaps important to theorize them as fully as we will theorize the games at hand. But I find it
critical to understand first what it means to play, what it means to identify with a character on a
screen in an interactive game, what it means to commit to a narrative, or anti-narrative story,
what it means to solve a puzzle before embarking on a study of more disturbing topics.
Course Goals
For people who play, design, code, build, or market games, this class will help you understand:
how it is that you identify with characters in a game, how games function as communication in
social space, how games train you to think and feel (consciously), how games trigger deeper
emotional responses and reflexes (unconsciously), and how games change your sense of
experience outside the game. You will acquire this knowledge through the three things we are
going to do in the class: 1) playing games and exploring how we think and feel as we play, 2)
reading scholarly articles about games, sound-tracks, music, noise, narrative, fairy tales,
psychology, sign systems, and 3) writing--individual responses to aspects of gaming,
collaborative writing in which a handful of you will craft a single paragraph describing an aspect
of a game, and longer critical papers bringing your personal experience of a game into a
conversation with the scholarly readings for the course. Class meets for three hours per day; we
will divide each class into three 50 minute segments with a 10 minute break between the first
and second and second and third hour. In general we'll play / work with a game during the first
hour. Then, after a break we'll discuss an article, both in terms of its precise contents and in its
relationship with video games in general and the game we have just been playing / working on,
in particular. Then, after a break, we'll break down into small groups for collaborative work.
Each collaborative session will result in a written document (worksheet, sketch, outline, report,
journal entries, etc) upon which each member will contribute.
By the way, the national Video Game Museum is about to open in Frisco, Texas!
Assessment
For Undergraduates
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daily written assignments = 20%
paper #1 = 30%
paper #2 = 50%
for Graduate Students:
The Same as Undergraduates with the exception that paper #2 will be a seminar paper (details
forthcoming).
Prerequisites
For both undergraduates, taking MUGC 4890: 501 and graduate students taking MUGC 5890:
501, I assume you are students of the University of North Texas in good academic standing. I
assume that you are interested not only in playing, but in probing in great detail as many
aspects as possible of the gaming experience, including reading challenging academic criticism. I
also assume that you are willing to work hard on your writing, as a vehicle for putting your
experiences into concrete form that you can share with others. You may have majors in the
humanities, the fine arts, business, engineering, the sciences, whatever. You may be native
speakers of English; you may have a native language other than English. You may be of
traditional age or you may be of a non-traditional age.
Requirements
You must all bring your own laptop computer to each class. You must buy and install on your
machines all of the video games we will discuss. Please bring your own earphones to each class,
a notebook with pen / pencil, and an empty flashdrive.
 05.16.2016
Introduction to the Course:
Star Trek, the Next Generation. Season 4, "Night Terrors"; Blade Runner (director's cut); The
Matrix (first one), and The Cell.
 05.17.2016
Myst
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle | Robert Scholes, Language, Narrative, and Anti-narrative:
pdf
Collaborative Workshop #1
 05.18.2016
Myst
Grahame String Weinbren, Mastery: Computer Games, Intuitive Interfaces and Interactive
Multimedia
Kaja Silverman, "Suture" from The Subject of Semiotics
Collaborative Workshop #2
 05.19.2016
Braid
Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage": pdf
Collaborative Workshop #3
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05.23.2016
Braid (from experience to reflection)
more on the mirror stage: YOUTUBE clip of Žižek on mirror (mis)recognition . This clip illustrates
the ending of Chaplin's movie City Lights. In the movie, Chaplin falls in love with a blind young
woman working in a flower shop. He scrapes together the money so she can have an operation
to see again. He does this; she has the operation; and she can see. Chaplin visits her at the shop
and at first she doesn't recognize him as her benefactor because she was blind. When she hears
his voice, she "knows" that her benefactor was Chaplin--the beggar. The scene Žižek discusses is
right at the end of the movie when we (and Chaplin) wonder what her reaction will be once her
(mis)recognition becomes recognition.
Today, during the first hour, we'll turn from playing and experiencing games to thinking about
the experience critically (reflectively). Here are some guidelines into thinking simply what you
experienced last Thursday, playing Braid:
o SUTURE
o the nature of your identification with Tim and the others: positive, negative,
constant, changing SILVERMAN
o presence of the big Other? LACAN
o problem solving strategies: breaking out of functional fixity, hill climbing / the
foothill problem, inference, action sequences, trying contradictions, try working
backwards, re-thinking relations, constraint satisfaction, analytic / holistic
thinking, metacognition, belief in the attainability of a goal DEWEY
o NARRATIVE / ANTI-NARRATIVE
o final goal(s), soft intermediate goals SCHOLES
o nature of the interaction: mastery (easy, difficult) WEINBREN
o death drive fantasy of return to place before trauma to master it anew? FREUD
o moment of (mis)recognition recognition (so to speak) LACAN
o MIS-EN-SCÈNE
o foreground | background
o natural / artificial
o utopia, distopia, realistic, fantastic, dreamlike: to what effect?
o constant | changing
o SOUND
o noise: natural, artificial: to what effect? does it change?
o music: natural (human), artificial: to what effect? does it change?
o evidence of sneaking: highly-charged sounds, music that emerge from the nearly
or completely inaudible background noise of a film (or video, or song, etc).
o Acousmatic sound is sound one hears without seeing their originating cause - a
invisible sound source. Radio, phonograph and telephone, all which transmit
sounds without showing their emitter are acousmatic media Offscreen sound in
film is sound that is acousmatic, relative to what is shown in the shot. In a film an
acousmatic situation can develop along two different scenarios: either a sound is
visualised first, and subsequently acousmatized, or it is a acousmatic to start
with, and is visualized only afterward. The first cause associates a sound with a
precise image from the outset. This Image can the reappear in the audience
mind each time the sound is heard off screen The second case, common to
moody mystery films, keeps the sound´s cause a secret before revealing all. (Deacousmatization) Opposite of Acousmatic sound is Visualized sound - a sound
accompanied by the sight of its source or cause. In film a onscreen sound whose
source appears in the image, and belongs to the reality represented therein
Pay particular attention to change: where, when, and to what effect does change occur in a
game?
Puzzle Solving
(Individual) Writing #4
 05.24.2016
Fez
Ruth Leys, The Turn to Affect: pdf
(Individual) Writing #5
 05.25.2016
Fez
Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" from Music, Image, Text
(Individual) Writing Workshop #6
 05.26.2016
Limbo
Tzvetan Todorov, "2 Principles of Narrative": pdf
Experimental Writing Workshop: Free Association
Paper #1 due at 10:00 a.m. today!
Write a paper (between 10 and 15 pages in length), printed out on 8/12 X 11 paper with page
numbers, single sided and double spaced on the Video GameDear Esther.
Your audience: the personnel manager of the software development company that
designed Dear Esther. He / she wants to see a sample of your writing and your ability to
understand video games critically; there's a job opening in his / her company in publicity, and
while he / she assumes you will not necessarily speak to the public in a highly academic fashion,
he / she does want to know how deeply you understand what the experience of playing video
games is, and can be. Your purpose: to show him / her how clearly you can express the various
facets of playing Dear Esther. Your voice: that's up to you.
You need not have a single, central thesis, but your paper must be clearly organized. The
easiest form is left-to-right discourse that matches and tracks the left-to-right experience of
playing the game.
Provide two forms of illustrations or evidence to support what you think: 1) citations (short,
long, paraphrase) from the readings (there must be at least a few of these), and 2) screen shots
of precise moments of the game to illustrate what you are saying.
Follow the basic ternary structure of discourse: 1) idea (in language), 2) illustration or quote
(from a source (readings or the game itself)), 3) comment (language).
Follow these writing quidelines. NB: you can omit #1 and modify your examples; this is handout
that was written for graduate writing in music courses!
Sample Documentation: short quote, long quote, paraphrase: pdf
Choose between a metonymic or metaphoric structure to your paper. In metonymy, the
progress of your paper mirrors the progress of the game. In metaphor, you write topically
about x, y, and z. In order to avoid having the paper read like a shopping list (a chunk on x, a
chunk on y, a chunk on z), do one of two things: 1) have a thesis that suggests a logic to talking
about x, then y, then z, or 2) have transitions take you from one chunk to another. End x with a
sentence that begins in x and ends in y; end y with a sentence that begins in y and ends in z.
Paper Topic #2 (due on the last day of class, hard copy at 10:00, double-spaced, single sided,
with page numbers. The first paper was academic, rigorous, documented. The second paper
can also be of those qualities, but I'd like to encourage outside-the-box, experimental writing.
You may write a short paper (with gorgeous, clear sentences without lame "to be verbs",
passive constructions, filler, etc) and some clear structure / design. Here are some options:
1) write a letter to one of the characters in one of the games we've played.
2) write a paper in which you imagine adding an element to the game: an alternate ending,
another character, completely different music, etc
3) write an essay about a personal response to one or more of the games we've discussed
4) do automatic writing on one or more of the games we've discussed. as in: free associate in
writing on each letter of the alphabet for a fixed period of time without stopping. or take
"LIMBO" and write a chunk on L, then I, then M, then B, then O.
5) write about which game you would like to enter if the game were "real" and you could enter
into it.
Whichever you choose, make sure your finished paper does read with some degree of
substantiality to it. Around 5 pages, double-spaced minimum. If your idea runs dry after a
paragraph or two, pick something else.
 05.30.2016
No Class: Memorial Day
 05.31.2016
Limbo
Ruth Leys, Trauma (introduction): pdf
Bonnie Ruberg, No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games: pdf
Pleasure Centers in the Brain: website
Individual Writing Conferences on Second Paper
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06.01.2016
Monument Valley
Logical Time (Lacan): pdf
Reading Drafts of Paper #2
 06.02.2016
Blindscape
Stephen E. Jones: 'Second Life,' Video Games, and the Social Text": pdf
Conclusions
Paper #2 due
 06.03.2106
Class is over obviously; I add this date as a container for readings that we never got to but I
might use in the future!)
Riddles
Ernest H. Lindley, "A Study of Puzzles with Special Reference to the Psychology of Mental
Adaptation": pdf
Hilde Hein "Play as Aesthetic Concept": pdf
Isidore Okpewho, "Re-thinking Epic": pdf
Joan, Tamburrini "Play and Intellectual Development": pdf
George Seward, "Play as Art": pdf
Stuart Jones, Space-Dis-Place: How Sound and Interactivity Can Re-Figure our Apprehension of
Space
Maria Tatar, "Why Fairy Tales Matter:" pdf
Joseph Nagy, Review of Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment.