#15 Engaging Play/Playing to Engage: Teaching and Learning through Creating Games in the College Humanities Classroom

Sean Smith and Jeff Lawler

This class provides students with hands on experience with games and their uses in the humanities classroom. The focus of our course is to learn how games are structured, how they function and how they can become an integral part of a humanities curriculum. Participants in this course will work to create a curriculum for their own humanities classrooms that introduces game analysis and theory. Specifically, we’ll look at how to develop a class that uses video games and tabletop/board games as objects of analysis. Students will end the course with a syllabus for a class of their own design. Taught by Jeff Lawler and Sean Smith co-directors of the Center for the History of Video Games and Critical Play, the course covers a variety of topics such as game theory and questions that games, including tabletops and video games, raise within humanities disciplines.

Auditor Option: Available

Related Materials:  instructor biographies

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering a compliment to Games for Digital Humanists and build on Using Digital Games as Critical Methods of Intervention, Advocacy, and Activism in Humanities Scholarship. Here we take a disciplinary specific approach to video games and offer practical ways of implementing them in lower division survey courses and upper division research seminars. Participants will leave class with a model assignment, prototype Twine game, and practical advice for implementing the project in upper or lower division history curriculum.