Choice of assignments to be completed over the course of the class (total of 1000 points for full credit)

Long-form essay

• 100 points
• Max of 1 submission a week, 5 submissions total
• Total potential points: 500

Book reviews

• 150 points
• Max of 1 submission a week, 3 submissions total
• Total potential points: 450

Blogs of the Round Table prompt

• 75 points
• Max of 1 submission per BoRT theme, 4 submissions total
• Total potential points: 300
• January prompt: Player’s choice
  • “This month, we’re interested in hearing about self-regulated or self-inflicted rules …. These are the circumstances we want to hear about: choices you make as a player that aren’t dictated or necessitated by the game, but which alter your experience and understanding of the game. Tell us about your choices and commitments to self-regulated play circumstances. Let’s talk about the resolutions you’ve made and how strong your resolve was in sticking to those modes of play.”
• February prompt: Buddy systems
  • “As competitive as games may be, they’re equally cooperative in nature. What do games do to foster teamwork? Which game characters can you only think of as partners? …. How have you used games to bond with others? On the other hand, how do games fail to bring you closer to others? Do your friends take you for granted because you prefer support classes? Tell us about the friendships that captivate you on either side of the screen, the mechanics that foster human contact or the systems that pull you apart.
• March prompt: Extended play
  • “Have you ever been so immersed or so invested in a game that it bleeds over (or extends over, if you will) the border of the screen and into your life? Maybe after a particularly grueling game session, you incorporated the game into your dream. …. Have you ever attempted to apply game logic outside a game? Forgotten you don’t actually know how to shoot a bow at all? We’d like to hear about the moment in your day-to-day where the line between game fiction and reality have, even if only for a moment, collided. What was the result? Did the collision force you to think about the game in a different way? about the moment in reality differently? both?
• April prompt:  Palette swaps
  • “Sub-Zero and Scorpion, Billy and Jimmy Lee, the weird Technicolor nightmare relationship of Mario, Luigi, Wario and Waluigi. Palette swapping a character was an easy way to differentiate characters with the same model that was cheap, efficient and, let’s face it, effective. But what does palette swapping do? Does it leave an original with multiple copies or does it create balance? Do games themselves treat players as something of a palette swap by making them into insignificantly differentiated copies of a template? Is it a lazy stretch for more content or does it show how important subtle differences can be? We want to know about the haircut swap that made you identify with a character, or the shopkeeper model you most identified with. Do we expect more out of games now that they’re “beyond” pixels and palettes or has nostalgia sweetened an old artistic technique?”

Short Takes

• 50 points
• Max of 1 submission a week, 6 submissions total
• Total potential points: 300

Glossary

• 10 points
• Max of 3 submissions a week, 30 submissions total
• Total potential points: 300

Discussion

• 10 points
• Max of 3 (graded) submissions a week, 20 (graded) submissions total
• Total potential points: 200

Discussion+

• 50 points
• Max of 1 submission a week, 5 submissions total
• Total potential points: 250 points

Other things

• ??? points
• Max of ??? submissions, ??? submissions total
• Total potential points: 300

Final essay project

Assignment

Deadlines