New class: The History of Video Games

I’ve been tasked with teaching a new class in the fall semester and it has to be related to culture in some way. So, me being me, I decided to do it about video game culture, charting video game development from the past up to the present day, and stopping in at some cultural points along the way. I started creating the curriculum around Tristan Donovan’s book: Replay: The History of Video Games. It’s a great (and thick!) book and provides me with plenty of content. Though starting to create slides, I realised that I might not have 14-weeks’ worth of lectures here. So, I’m thinking about how I can get students to do talks for the class during the second half of the semester. I was inspired by a talk I saw by Ian Gibson at the weekend about peace education in Japan. Not that the content of the class is the same, but the teacher had an inquiry-based approach which reminded me of Postman’s book: Teaching as a Subversive Activity. From memory:

• The teacher lectures for the first few classes to acclimatize students to the topic of the class
• The teacher also provides a model presentation of how (s)he’d like the students to present
• Students are separated into groups and are in charge of presenting each week on a rota

The content of the presentations was something like:

• Introduce a well-known act of violence or war from multiple standpoints
• Create a list of questions for the audience
• Engage in discussion on the questions provide, and provide more as audience members.

This is what I’m thinking of doing for my own classes too. Thinking of this set up:

1. First few weeks, I introduce the history of video games
2. Students experience/play some of them.
3. Students do some fieldwork by going to their local 1) arcades, 2) electronics stores, 3) Akihabara
4. I model a presentation on a cultural aspect of video games (probably the link between military technology progress and the video game industry)
5. Students pick one of the following and present on it:
   • cultural influence of a particular game
   • a cultural aspect of the video game scene in general (politics, economics, social issue/action, etc.)