COMM4474 · Communication

Digital Gaming and Gaming Cultures

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Satisfies one of two writing-intensive courses required within the Communication major. The purpose of this course is to understand the place of games and gaming in contemporary culture. While the course starts with an introduction to games and gaming in a general sense, most of the content is focused on video games and digital gaming culture including but not limited to the interaction between cultural context game design, game dialogue and content, identity representation in video games, game-book-movie adaptations, as well as issues such as gamergate, esports competitions, microtransactions, and exploitation and harassment in the gaming industry. In other words, this course takes digital gaming as a cultural text and approaches it from a multidisciplinary perspective. Our aim is to move from mindless consumption of video games to understanding them as any other cultural text that needs to be approached with care and critical thought.This course will meet regularly in our gaming lab. We will have lecture times as well as gaming lab times. Our gaming lab times will be dedicated to playing and analyzing games that had an important impact on the industry as well as on the players.Moreover, this is a writing-intensive course that requires a 25-page research paper that the student is expected to undertake through the course of the semester. The topic of the research paper needs to be about games or gaming culture, though the students can shape their research paper based on where their interest lies relative to the topic at hand.