FEATURE // VIDEO GAMES
// Rachelle Bugeaud
Damn, it feels good to be a gamer U of A's Understanding Video Games course opens up the world of gaming to all
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nderstanding Video Games has been a popular course among University of Alberta students, but now launched alongside Dino 101 as a Massive Open Online Course, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up and learn about how to interpret these ever-more important cultural contributions. And people in 149 countries already have. "The idea behind the course is, certainly as we've seen recently in the media, computer games are an important cultural medium—they have become something that a lot of Canadians view as an important way of understanding the world and relating to the world," says Sean Gouglas, who teaches the course. "So what we wanted to do in this course is to give [students] a set of
tools that they can use to try to understand what computer games are. That they can see how they work, that they can see how they can tell stories and how you can interpret them and use them to understand the culture that produces them." There's an online version of the course that's free for anyone, and also a version where students at other universities can sign up and get accreditation for a fee. This is good for alumni who want to stay in contact, Gouglas says, and it is a potential way for anybody else to get to know the university. Existing U of A students are, of course, still able to enroll as usual. As a Science, Technology and Society course and a collaboration between the Faculties of Arts and Science, it
fits into the relatively new Computer Game Certificate program, which came from an initiative from the current Dean of Science, Jonathan Schaeffer. "It was an idea that started with the realization that computer games are, if they ever were, no longer built by a couple of people in their basement. They're involving computing scientists, creative writers, level designers, artists, musicians, so what Dr Schaeffer wanted to do was recreate that experience for the students who are going through the program," Gouglas says. "So with an introductory course called Computers and Games, we created a team-based, problem-based learning course around video games. Students just basically go and build a game. That
course has expanded into a certificate." The various courses on offer delve into creative writing, artificial intelligence, gameplay fundamentals and more. Once students have done a few of those, they can go into the capstone course where they build a complete game in teams. The idea for the certificate program is to not only give disciplinary and interdisciplinary experience, but also a portfolio of complete games. Local game developer Bioware has been a part of the university's video games courses for a long time, and they've been back to help with this one. "They gave us art assets that we were able to use in the course,"
VUEWEEKLY NOV 6 – NOV 12, 2014
Gouglas says. "They've given us access to their people—we did some filming at Bioware, we've interviewed six or seven of their employees. They've been very generous in making themselves available to help us provide concrete examples of some of the concepts that we're trying to relate in the course." The course starts with some basic concepts. The idea is to give students fundamental tools that they'll need to understand video games. This will include things like game mechanics, story and gameplay. After the basics, the course moves onto interpretation and tackles some cultural questions, such as what gaming culture is. "And it's a bit misleading because CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 >>
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