MDST3712 — Spring, 2024; meets TuTh 12:30pm – 1:45pm
Note: I do not support petitions for this course to count for the University’s Second Writing Requirement. While a great deal of writing is required for the course, it is largely of a creative and peer-assessed manner, and is thus inappropriate to fulfill that requirement.
Many forms of media are centered around story, narrative, and world-building. In recent years, however, some media have introduced new and interesting ways for narratives to involve play — through making choices that direct the story, allowing audiences to meaningfully interact with the story, and otherwise make storytelling “interactive.” In this course, we will engage with interactive storytelling in media, through a focus on popular playful media — digital games, role-playing, board and card games, and interactive storytelling media of other forms.
This course will begin with a dive into relevant academic scholarship and will quickly move into being primarily focused on game design. Students will play and prototype at least four different interactive narrative experiences over the course of the term across multiple platforms potentially including Twine (text-based interactive fiction), Inform (text-based interactive fiction), Bitsy (simple two-dimensional game spaces), along with role-playing and board/card game design. Students will encounter a number of ways that storytelling has been made interactive through mobile and console video games, alternate reality games, tabletop “story games,” and through interactive experiences in media streaming platforms (Netflix, in particular).
No experience with games (storytelling or otherwise!) is required, and no previous experience with game design is expected. All platforms for design have been chosen to facilitate interactive story design from novice designers, with no programming experience needed. However, all students will be expected to engage with interactive storytelling critically across multiple forms, to wrestle with their understandings of these media through design, and to articulate arguments for understanding the implications of playful narrative media for other media. This course will feature no in-class exams of any kind, with all assessment focused on multiple play and design experiences and a final, culminating analytic paper.
This course will not require any books for you to purchase, but you will be required to have regular access to the internet for all instruction, you will need to have the ability to play several games over the term (from a list we’ll negotiate in class, at least partially dependent on what hardware you have available to you), and you’ll need to have access to a Netflix account for about one week’s time.
We will design digital games, but largely be playing non-digital games in the course. Some of these will likely include:
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We will coordinate regular play sessions outside of class and occasionally over Zoom, for students to better understand the narrative systems we’ll be exploring firsthand. In the class, we will explore the narrative potential of games and playful systems implemented on digital game systems but will not privilege those platforms over good old fashioned paper, pencils, cards, dice, maps, journals/diaries, and other physical media. If you are interested in courses that explore the creative potential games (digital and non-digital) and are interested in building collaborative narratives, then this will probably be fun for you!
If you have any questions about this or any other course (or anything else on this website), please don’t hesitate to email Dr. Duncan at his first name dot his last name [at] virginia.edu.