Lately, I’ve been interested in novel approaches to teaching interactive media. I’ve been looking (from afar) at how Jason Mittell (television and media scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow product of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been “teaching The Wire“ this semester, conducting a fascinating pedagogical experiment — how does one teach long-form media, especially media which totals sixty hours, each of which is critical for the understanding the whole work? He takes a (to my knowledge) unique approach:

We’ll be treating the entire series as the core text, as one might study the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare. Watching 5 episodes a week, we’ll be considering the show both as an aesthetic achievement and social argument, asking two key questions: what does The Wire teach us about the possibilities of television, and what does it teach us about contemporary urban America? I’ll try to post here regularly about the challenges and revelations about teaching a long-form television narrative in its entirety, something that I do not believe has been done before in this form (if anyone knows of similar models, let me know).

Mittell’s approach was, thus, to teach the entire television series, an episode at a time throughout the term. It’s a great idea, and he’s set up a blog for the course (check out the comments by who I presume are students in the course); I encourage interested folks to check it out. Also, he makes an excellent case for why a course on this particular show requires watching the entirety of the series right here in this short, three minute video put out by Middlebury:

Mittell and Middlebury seem quite aware that there’s a bit of audacious academic theater going on with a course like this (why else would the College release a PR video?), and that’s great. But, I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched much of The Wire. I own the first season on DVD, watched a few episodes and got thoroughly lost in simply keeping the characters straight. I’m aware that this is an egregious error on my part — it’s apparently really a great show, I know, I know. I just need to devote some attention and energy and time to it. Someday!

Regardless, what I’m most interested in here are the pedagogical implications of Mittell’s course for the kinds of media that I’m currently looking at — videogames. Games are, as most know, equally long-form kinds of media (e.g., something like Fallout 3 clocks in at around 50-60 hours of play minimum), albeit with much more variation as we’re talking about an interactive rather than filmic kind of experience. Would something like this work for studying games? And, if so, which games in particular would work? And for what ends?

The only course I’ve taken here which has done something similar is Constance Steinkuehler’s virtual worlds course. In it, we were required to purchase and play World of Warcraft throughout the semester, reflecting on our play as well as doing fieldwork within the space of the game. Now, this is quite different from what Mittell’s doing — Constance’s course was about developing critical skills to approach understanding a virtual space, while Mittell’s seems predominantly about conducting an analysis of a long-form text. The goals seem quite different for both courses.

Additionally, one gets into platform issues with something like this. For a television show, there are many, many ways to watch 5 hours per week (iPhone, laptop, streaming, or on a, gasp, TV), but with a videogame there are few platform-independent long-form works that have a large degree of narrative depth. I suppose something available on the 360, PS3, and PC, like Grand Theft Auto IV might be worth exploring. Or something free and available for a number of computer operating systems (e.g., Dwarf Fortress)? A critical issue would be how the few games widely available for multiple formats might constrain the educational goals of the course — Dwarf Fortress is a fascinating set of complex systems, but it’s not something with the narrative complexity of The Wire. GTA IV seems a better bet, and one that could induce some interesting reactions.

Anyway, just exploring ideas — my gut feeling is that I’d love to give something like this a shot, but I’d have to think very carefully about exactly what a detailed focus on a long-form game would buy me and the students. One thing that Mittell has captured with this is that the structure of University classes just doesn’t afford the in-depth, continued analysis of a media text very well (supplementing the course with a blog and out-of-class viewings). I’d be interested in further exploring how a class focusing heavily on a single game could challenge assumptions about more than what counts as worthy of study in a University course, but also the way one teaches the predominant forms of media in this day and age.