Games in a Discipline

As you will notice throughout the class, most Game Studies scholars didn’t come from programs where Game Studies was a degree option. As such, there are scholars from various disciplines, from psychology to computer science, from English studies to anthropology, from education to management, who create scholarship and do research surrounding games. For this paper, you will do three things: 1. Pick an academic discipline and a scholar to use as your model/reference point 2. Pick a topic in that discipline (for example, if you were to choose education, you might look at games and literacy) 3. Pick a game (a single game) You will then write a 4-5 page (approximately 1250 word) paper that looks at the topic, in the game, from the perspective of the discipline/scholar you chose. The scholar you choose doesn’t need to be someone who studies games (though that might make the assignment easier). Here’s an example, though. Perhaps you want to study games as art, utilizing the scholarly work of Walter Benjamin (who is most famous for his work “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction”). Using Benjamin’s belief about original art vs. reproduced art, you might choose to look at user-created levels in Super Mario Maker to consider whether they carry a similar artistic value to the original levels (or to each other). This project will be graded on four criteria: Did you carefully choose each of the three things above (criteria 1, 2, and 3)? 4. Does your argument make sense within the confines of the three things?