Online Games: Literature, New Media, & Narrative · 4:05am Mar 8th, 2017
I thought a lot of you might find this upcoming Coursera course pretty cool:
Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media.
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.
To register & get a certificate costs $49. To sit thru it without getting the certificate is free. Starts April 3, but you can get started on it now; it's all online.
Hmm. Definitely seems super neat. I've enrolled, but the nice thing about Coursera is that you can always just not do the thing, so I guess we'll see how it turns out...
Never heard of Coursera. Is it, er, useful?
4448868 I've taken one course, "Mining massive datasets." It was a good course, but the professor (from Stanford) was indifferent to the concerns of students who'd invested time in the course and wanted the grading to be fair. There were multiple occassions [GODDAMN IT I STILL CAN'T SPELL OCCASIONS CORRECTLY] where he posted the wrong date for a quiz or a deadline and then screwed over the students who didn't do it on time because of his mistake.
I spell the word "occasion" wrong every single time I use it. I mean I have literally looked it up thousands of times. About once a day for 20 or 30 years, probably. Why can't I remember how to spell that word?
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Gee what a great guy. True professorship right there. I have heard a few similar complaints about online courses. I wonder if it's a side effect of the medium, or just your regular bad professors.
Have you ever considered teaching?
Haha you can't spell ocassion haha you silly head everyone can spell that one!
Wait...
It has two c's?
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Time to put on your moccasins and walk back over to the dictionary.
(This should either help, or get you to also start spelling "moccasins" wrong.
)
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cado, cadere, cecidi, casus
occado, occadere, occecidi, occasus
asian
asion
occasion
4450661 THIS WILL CHANGE MY LIFE!!
4449214 For me, it's "excercise," which I spell with an extra C most of the time.
4457909 I used to do that to! Somehow I stopped.
exert, exercise, except, exhort, exorbitant, exsanguinate, ecstasy...
English is dumb.
4457980 It's a love/hate relationship for me. I'm trying on the 'love' part.
Well, I'm definitely doing this course. I started playing the game already. Super fun. If anyone else is doing the course and playing the game, just reach out to me and I'd love to either play, or just discuss the course with you.