| 7 | 2/25 | Play either Mansions of Madness or Betrayal at the House on the Hill | |
| 2/27 | Watch the first 15 minutes or so of the walkthrough of the Untitled Goose Game.
Ian Bogost “Don’t Play the Goose Game: Untitled Goose Game is fun. The problem is, all games are also work,” The Atlantic. Optional additional reading: Ian Bogost “Video Games Are Better Without Characters: The real legacy of SimCity is its attempt—and failure—to make complex systems the protagonists instead of people,” The Atlantic |
||
| 3/1 | Side Quest 7: 3d print a game piece
Podcast episodes 5 & 6 |
We’ll discuss Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill in class today (Tuesday). We’ll also go over logistics for playing Fiasco and I’ll distribute dice and other materials you’ll need.
On Thursday we’ll discuss Untitled Goose Game, and in particular Ian Bogost’s assertion that “playing a game is a chore. That’s the big problem with video games: To enjoy them, you have to play them. And playing them requires exerting the effort to operate them. Games are machines, and broken ones at that. The player’s job is to make them work again.” Untitled Goose Game became such an unexpected hit last year, Bogost argues, because it offers “a counterintuitive way out of the quandary of game-play’s fundamental aggravation: Someone has to play the game, but that someone needn’t be you. It might even be more fun not to play the game than to play it. Untitled Goose Game is a game about work’s ubiquity in the guise of a game about leisure’s frivolity. And like all labor, the best way to get it done is to farm it out to others. Let the memers honk their geese so you don’t have to.”
Your next side quest will require that you visit the TechLab and 3d print some sort of game piece.
