Featured Image: “Ian Bogost.” by Donovan Henneberg-Verity.

Community-Building Exercise (Turn to your partner, 10 minutes)

What’s one game (video game or board game) that you’ve played recently that you hate, and which your friends like? Why do you not like it? Why do you think your friends like the game?

Get Into Groups (10 minutes).

Groups of 3-4. Assign Roles. You will need:

• Project Leader: This person is also responsible for scheduling meetings, keeping the group on task, delegating responsibilities, and resolving conflicts.
• Technology Expert: This person will focus on matching the best communication modalities and technologies to complete the projects. This person is also responsible for troubleshooting technology issues, reserving equipment, and seeking out additional assistance when needed.
• Game Expert (2): This person should have a good knowledge of video and board games, and will help make decisions based upon the type of game to play and the type of game to design.

Blog Post (10 minutes).

Now, you’ll need to choose a game. Here is a list of recent indie games. If you don’t like any of these, you may choose another game, but I don’t want large-industry games like Dark Souls, Doom, NFL Madden, or Deus Ex. Usually, these games are priced around $10-20, and take around 7 hours to play. Also, try to pick a game that isn’t too difficult and will allow all members of the group to play. I’ve listed the games on STEAM, but you may purchase (as a group) one of these or similar games from any store.

WARNING: Some of these games might be triggering, traumatic, NSFW, with depictions of violence, language, satanic imagery, and other things that might be distressing.

• Waking Mars
• Undertale
• Inside
• This War of Mine
• Braid
• Limbo
• Terraria
• Albert and Otto
• Closure
• Amnesia
• Running with Rifles
• Penumbra
• Metrico
• Parallax
• Selma and the Wisp
• SEUM: Speedrunners from Hell
• Devil Daggers
• To the Moon
• The Long Dark

Pick a game, get each other’s contact information, and plan on playing the game together at least once before Thursday’s class.

Introduction to WordPress (20 minutes).

• Find the email I sent you and go to http://www.rogerwhitson.net/dtc101F16/wp-admin.
• Log in with the appropriate information.
• Edit your profile. Enter a first and a last name and a photograph that is recognizable to me. Also edit your password, so you are able to remember it.
• After all of your group members have logged in and edited their profile, write a post listing all of your group members as co-authors. In the post, list the group members, their roles, the game you picked, and tag the post with “Groups.”

In Your Groups (20 minutes):

Play: Tetris and First-Person Tetris. Reflect on your experience playing both games.

• Have you played Tetris before? Here’s something I found today on the history of the game.
• Outline three ways that these games exemplify Bogost’s argument that “games are models of experiences rather than textual descriptions or visual depictions of them.”
• What’s the experience being modeled here?

Large Group Discussion (10 minutes):

• Tell me what you found. How do games model different kinds of experience? Talk about this with reference to some games you’ve played in the past. Here are mine: