Course Schedule

PAH 230 – Video Games as Artifacts: Appreciating Interactive Multimedia Entertainment.

This course introduces students to the techniques and varying contexts of critically appreciating video games. In addition to studying the ways that digital games, and their creators, play upon consumer's senses, students will develop a working vocabulary of evaluative terms (e.g., taste, judgement, pleasure, style, beauty) that can be usefully and sometimes uniquely applied to objects derived from the video game medium. They will also learn and practice a set of critical and practical skills designed to help them both understand the role of critical judgement in the experience of play, as well as how play itself may be an integral part of a game's overall look and feel. Through the course of the semester, we will: 1) briefly survey the history of media criticism, paying particular attention to how conventional understandings of terms such as "critique" and "effect" may or may not apply to video games; 2) examine research-informed case studies to learn and practice techniques for thinking about how and why game evaluation has developed as it has over the last half-century, as well as how it differs from the judgement of other forms of artistic expression; and 3) generate substantive original critiques of video games past and present.