Hints, Advice, and Maybe Cheat Codes: An English Topics Course About Computer Games
Abstract
Computer games embody one of the central challenges facing English Studies: the question of how to adapt pedagogies originally intended to address the exigencies of print culture to artifacts that produce meaning through a number of different and, at times, desperate mediums. This article describes a 300-level English topics course that I designed in response to this challenge. Focusing on the course syllabus, assignments, and other documents, it provides an overview of the course’s scaffolded, social-constructivist pedagogy. It explains how I employ specific elements of this pedagogy to accomplish two ostensibly contradictory goals: 1)to help students understand how the methodologies traditionally privileged by English Studies are relevant to computer games; and 2) to help them recognize and thereby address the limitations of these methodologies through scholarship, game design, or other forms of critical performance.
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