f13.net

a Vanderbilt University English course that explores the role of storytelling in the MMO medium. (http://worldsofwordcraft.wordpress.com/syllabus-2008/)

The shit you get away with when you have tenure.  It boggles the mind.

That's an Assignment. Unbelievable.  Wonder if I can get partial credit or an exemption for my stale blog.

Easiest class ever.

You know there's a wonderful presumption about this syllabus; namely, that all players are playing-within-the-game and playing-it-as-a-"game".  They invoke books that talk about meta gaming (e.g. RMT) but all the assignments are play-nicely.   :hello_kitty:

I wonder what it would be like if instead they had some PKer in the class who just let rip.   :drill:


> would Mr.WUA & Mr.Cheddar plz come to the Dean's office.

English.  MMORPG storytelling.  wat.

You're telling me that we ran out of classics?  They've already read everything from Chaucer to Nabokov eh?   Is this just a fucking joke?  Perhaps afterwards we can go with "English 115F:  Analyzing critical theory using book reports by fifth graders"


Now using a MMORPG for sociology I could see.   Actually, that would be an improvement over the usual sociology course.

The prof wanted his grants to pay for his subscription.

*facepalm*

I do believe that storytelling in MMGs and adaptation of a literary work to a game are subjects worth of study. In university, though? No.

It's something those who do it for a living should learn. Writing MMGs is a unique skill set from telling a story in a book, P&P RPG, or even a single-player RPG.

I would sign up for this class if I lived near Vanderbilt just to get a discount on Adobe software. :awesome_for_real:

Also, I'd roleplay a furry. And use f13 as my blog. You're all lucky I'm in Austin.

Edit: http://discoverarchive.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/1238

Someone listen to that Mp3 so we can discover how fruitbaggy all the stuff going on over there really is.

I mean, obvious jokes aside, why does learning have to be boring?  Its a 100 level English class, and people will probably be a lot more engaged in their writing than in "write me a bunch of shit you hate 101."

Who said learning had to be boring?

Anyway, this shit is simply not going to prepare these kids for anything in the future, and I bet you at least 10% of them suffer from lower grades in all of their other classes because they've got addictive personalities and managed to somehow magically avoid MMOGs til now. In fact, if anyone took a microscope to this class, it would be wiped from the schedule faster than you can say "My paper is late because I had to raid."

Look, I don't mind some of the content (reading) of that class, and exploring narrative in games isn't a horrible idea for a class in and of itself, but you simply don't learn anything useful or enlightening from leveling up a character in LOTRO.  And I just don't see why the adaptation of LOTR into the MMORPG format is anything to be interested in other than looking at it via gameplay or technical issues, neither of which have anything to do with English.

And if it were actually a course primarily focused on writing, it's doing even worse, because wasting time blogging about your character in a MMORPG is even more useless than playing the MMORPG is, and that's 30% of the grade!

Finally, being too harsh on things online for the sake of comedy...well, shit.  What else are you supposed to do on the internet?

Would LOTRO slash fic be appropriate to hand in if that is what you built your character for? "Brokeback Mount Doom" is a catchy title.

They are speaking English.. in that way it qualifies as English 115.  The F is for Fail.

I do believe part of the point of the class is English and storytelling IN MODERN MEDIA. IMHO, LOTRO story's and subsequent quests are some of the best in the MMO subgroup. If you don't read the quests, you wouldn't know this.

I think there's a lot of value in the critical analysis of pop culture.  The syllabus for this particular course doesn't look like it's got a lot of critique, but hell, it's first year.  The point at that level is to get people interested, and give them a general idea of how you can apply literary theory to non-traditional "texts".  I'd enroll.

This.

Once your past the first set of upper-division English courses (*insert_region_here* Literature I/II/III), the classes either drill down into specific movements/authors or start dealing with non-traditional works.  I'd rather do four hours/week of the latter than four hours/week of the Canterbury Tales.

Any particular reason you pick on Chaucer?

Whilom ther was dwellynge in my contree
And erchedeken, a man of heigh degree,
That boldely dide execucioun
In punysshynge of fornicacioun,
Of wicchecraft, and eek of bawderye,
Of difamacioun, and avowtrye,
Of chirche reves, and of testamentz,
Of contractes and of lakke of sacramentz,
Of usure, and of symonye also.

That's not really answering my question.

The important question here, though, is whether taking this class will cause job recruiters to pass you over because you played an MMOG?

A British Dude did his thesis by translating The Cantebury Tales to rap (not gangsta stuff, more melodic). (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4721073.stm)

I have the album, it's actually really good.

By "British" you mean Canadian don't you.  :grin:

Thanks for that - may have get a copy. Pop culture is all well and good but my kids are going to get raised on Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Err yeah. Canadian. I'm sick today. I blame the BBC.

Good lord, you guys overreact. Did you read through the syllabus, or just grab whatever struck your fancy?

Reading through the syllabus, it appears the professor has a rather modern focus, yes, but one of the things he's doing (and it's insanely obvious from the syllabus) is having his students read Lord of the Rings, watch the movie, and play the game -- then compare the way the story is presented in all three. (Check the week 3 paper he/she assigns). Or the Week 11 paper (either some discussion on the Faerie Queene or a compare/constrast the journey to Weathertop in the game and the book)

Week Six introduces Snow Crash, with a requirement to contrast the novel with scenes from Strange Days.

The blogging assignments are straightforward -- requiring students to indulge in thoughtful or creative writing regularly, with access for the instructor. Beats the fuck out of handing in JUST papers, and allows students to work in a mix of formal and informal styles. (Shit, most people could really use a day of "How the fuck to write an email -- emailing your boss is different from emailing your mom, moron"). Even the character biography is simple an example of creative writing in context of the class.

Week 8 has them trying the story in Neverwinter Nights 2, then delve into the clusterfuck of Star Wars Galaxies --- starting with the New York Times article about the NGE shit.  If you like classics, part of the Faerie Queene is in there.

This isn't a bad class --- rephrase, it could be run poorly by the professor, but there's nothing wrong with the syllabus. If anything, it's a damn good idea. It forces students out of the box that High School's generally put them in, and forces them to engage their brains and pay attention to how the stories themselves are told -- what's changed and cut between books, movies, and games -- and how people invest themselves in stories.

I have no doubt that Vanderbilt requires the usual delving into classical English literature -- this appears to replace their standard English composition class. I see nothing wrong with it -- there's multiple papers required, a great deal of daily writing, and the subjects themselves require students to concentrate on how stories are told and modified and compared. There are multiple writing typles involved -- informal blogging and more formal and reasoned papers, creative writing and off-the-cuff analysis.

It's not a bad concept. It's a fuckton superior in terms of design and what it (on the surface) asks of the students than the standard English Comp classes I took at A&M.

Beats reading whatever tripe they usually ask you to read in college literature courses.

It's not a literature course -- or if it is, Vanderbilt structures theirs strangely (since I don't go there, I have no idea!). It looks like a comp class, or a mix of the two. Some English Lit classes are literature specific -- studying past literature and it's influence. Some are more "classes about literature". What makes good literature, how stories and influences intereact, that sort of thing.

It's really hard to tell from the syllabus, and I'm too lazy to check Vanderbilt's web site to see if it's classified comp or lit.

But hell, I took -- after English 101 and 102 (English comp and English lit) a class devoted to science fiction as my upper-level lit course. We covered everything from Frankenstien to The Lathe of Heaven, and it was a pretty good class.

Either way, it's not badly structured. There's a variety of writing styles required, a solid focus on examining the same story through multiple methods of storytelling, that sort of thing. Judging purely by the syllabus, it's a solid class. The professor could suck balls, of course.

Ok, then explain "what is the class about?"   What are you supposed to learn?  And why would learning it at that University be different than say reading f13?  Or doing this at DigiPen?  Or reading Stormwaltz's blog (if he had one) to learn about narrative in games?

If there was an exam that said "summarize what you have learned in the class" what would it say? 

Any University course (and they are expensive) ought to be able to give you clear objectives for your money.  This is why I'm skeptical.

I did. The class appears to be an examination of writing and storytelling through multiple media. I suspect Lord of the Rings was chosen (and it's not the ONLY thing they do in the class) because they have the same story told through three entirely different mediums -- book, movie, game. Several assignments are very specific "Compare the story book versus film at this moment" sort of thing.

Seems to also have the required English 101 writing assignments -- two papers, some creative/open writing, that sort of thing.
Modern storytelling, modern literature, and the effects of medium on it. You don't think that's worth studying? Movies, games, books -- they're all (or can be) mediums for telling stories. They differ in how the story is told, which changes what sort of stories and how you tell them.

This goes a bit beyond "narratives in games", though.

As to what you'd get -- probably developing your own opinions and thinking on the matter, which is a bit beyond what most people do when they read a blog. There's nothing stopping you from, say, reading every assignment given out in a standard Freshman lit course. Yet, strangely, they charge you for it instead of just handing out a list of books to read and giving you credit.

Exams are a poor way to judge how you learned in a literature class. Or rather, your exam would be something like "Discuss at length the different approaches to the character of Faramir in the movie and in the book. Why the changes?" and then "Discuss various stylistic elements used in the escape from the Shite in the game and in the movie. What commonalities are there? What is different? Why was it done that way?".

That's a pretty detailed syllabus, and seems quite clear to me -- and I'm not an English major.

The objectives seem pretty clear to me, and all it took was a bit of reading. Three variants of modern (20th century or so) literature, same story told through three different mediums. Sprinkled in some other writings with corresponding films (although nothing as close as the three LoTR's things, a number of writing and analysis assignments, and some open writing.

What exactly is missing in terms of "clear objectives"? Read this. Play that. Watch this. Compare them. Contrast them. Identify common elements to the narrative, similar approaches. Identify medium-unique ones. Write out this analysis in a several page paper. Defend your assertations. Using this medium, do some open writing not analysis. Now compare Snow Crash to Strange Days. What's different? What's the same? How are the narratives handled? What does medium change?

That's English lit. I fail to see what's not clear there. It reads like EVERY other English lit syllabus I ever saw, except there's more of a focus on mediums other than writing. Which makes sense, since modern storytelling is NOT restricted to book form. If you're going to complain those objectives aren't clear, then you'll probably never find an English class with clear objectives.

Well, unless it was a BAD English class. Like "Learn how to write a five paragraph essay" bad.

Huh, reading it even further -- it's a specialist English class devoted to story-telling in alternate media.

Half the grade is the 3 papers, 30% is equivalant to class discussion (the blog writing) and 20% is a mix of classroom specific stuff and a narrative project.

You should be applauding this class. It's designed to get people whose focus is writing and story-telling to learn how modern styles (specifically games, but to a smaller extent film) require altering common techniques, and what the trade-offs are.

Given the shit-tastic writing in a lot of games, this should be applauded it. There's some decent reading in there too -- I'd have to go to Vanderbilt to check, but I suspect this is an elective class for English majors. It's certainly not a required class for anything.

Right.  I like the idea.  But for a first year level course this is ridiculous.  Yes, study narrative (interesting Film Studies seminar topic: LotRO the film vs. the original trilogy.  How Jackson and team made the story work), but leave the course with something you can build on. Your money, kids.

Edit: I'm jealous a bit.  This would be a neat intro to literature.  If it was show them how stories had a history and extensibility and structure (and thus portability).

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog (http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/) and it is pretty awesome. Serpentes on a Shippe (http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2006/08/serpentes-on-shippe-spoylerez.html) and Ich Pwn Noobs (http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2006/08/ich-pwne-noobs.html) are particular favourites of mine.

I broke down, went to the Vanderbilt web page, found their English department, and looked up the 115F designation.

It's a Freshman seminar. The topic changes each semester. This year's:

Seminar's like this are generally required only for majors in that field, so this is a specialist English class, devoted to people pursuing an undergraduate degree in English. It's a perfectly fine first-year course for English majors, and quite useful -- if you don't find this sort of class and study interesting, you shouldn't be a bloody English major. Which I suspect is half the reason to require it.

I wish I had something as interesting as this in my first year English classes.

At least for my part, he really was answering it.  Generally, I was making a point of how specific upper-division literature classes can get once your past the survey courses.


A Freshman Seminar on Dystopian Literature would probably give me enough love for the major to slum through some of the more boring classes to come :heart:.

Also, you reminded me how weird UCLA is.  100-199 are for upper division courses, so most folk's 101s and 102s are single-digits.

First off, I think there's a lot to be said for studying how narrative works in everyday cultural practice, and for that purpose, any genre or context is as good as any other. A colleague of mine teaches a class where he looks at not just Beowulf but a lot of later reworkings of Beowulf, both high literature and popular culture. The students aren't just studying Beowulf as a remote work of "great culture", but also as a story that gets told, reused, rethought, integrated into culture. Most people are not going to write high-culture literature; a lot of people are going to have to rework older stories and tropes in their professional lives. That's some part of what advertisers do, of what politicians and policy experts do, it's some part of what lawyers do. Anybody who produces popular culture at any level does it. Anybody who does professional work where they have to persuade people to act a particular way is going to draw on deeply embedded narratives or stories if they're any good at it. They may do that fairly intuitively, but you get way better at communicating with people, motivating them, if you have a conscious sense of how stories work, how cultural touchstones form, and so on.

Second, there's just a basic pedagogical question here: do you study something by doing it or by reading about it? You could teach a class on narrative in popular culture (like the Beowulf one mentioned above) just by reading and viewing stuff and then writing standard analytical essays or papers about what you read and saw. With the right professor and syllabus, that works well enough. There's plenty of very good, demanding scholarship on narrative in games: Juul, Aarseth, Murray to start. It's stupid to argue that there aren't some interesting narrative issues with games that are distinctive in their own right, at any rate. Narratives that you experience interactively are fundamentally different in some important ways than narratives that you read in an unbroken experience or narratives that you view passively. If it's true that interactive forms of culture are going to be more important or dominant as this century goes on, it seems to me that it's a good thing to study how they work, whether they work, when they work, whether or not you're going to try and produce interactive media yourself. If it's a waste of time to study interactive narrative, it's a waste of time to study all narrative in any form. Which maybe some of you think, and ok, if you think that, don't waste time slagging on one English class, slag off the humanities as a whole.

If you think in addition that people learn well by experiencing or doing something as well as just studying it, then if you're going to teach about interactive narrative, you've got to find *some* way to have students experience games. I've only taught a few classes where gaming or interactive media are a part of the course, and I have to say that it is really hard to figure out how to work in an experiential component to the class in a serious way. It's important that you do *something* of that kind, I think: it's actually tremendously difficult to understand games or other interactive media just by reading a description of them or watching someone demonstrate one. Watch someone try to describe a video or computer game to a group of people who've never played one, or try to do it yourself. It's a really hard thing to do. Now if I were teaching about interactive narrative, would I have people play as much as this course seems to propose? No, I don't think I would. But it's not an absurd approach on the face of it. Would I make this a first-year course? No, I'd very much make it a smaller upper-level course. But this is also just a judgement call, and not transparently absurd.

It's pretty freaky to watch people as interested in games as you lot respond in such a knee-jerk way to this syllabus. Like I said, if you think this is rot because all the humanities are rot, fine. I don't agree, but that position has some coherence to it. If you have a fine-grained disagreement with some aspect of the pedagogical design, fine. But to say, "OMYFUCKINGGOD, someone's teaching about video games in English, English is for teaching DA CLASSICS in as passive and dull a manner as possible"? Seriously?

One other issue that I agree is worth considering is whether it's possible to think well and learn about narrative in interactive media or about the transformations of narrative across different media forms and across history without studying it formally in university in the first place. I'd say that yes, some people are effective auto-didacts who learn things like this completely on their own, for free. Or some people acquire this kind of knowledge through very lengthy experience, e.g., playing tons and tons of games over five or ten or twenty years. But if you're an 18-year old interested in narrative and cultural history and mass media, but haven't played games much, a course in university might actually be a more efficient and affordable way to open up those interests, broaden your mind, get some new ideas, than playing fifty or sixty games in your everyday life over a period of five or ten years. If you think of yourself as someone who understands interactive media and interactive storytelling through your own game-playing, and believe you can apply that understanding usefully in other work or aspects of your life, ask yourself this: how much time and money did you spend acquiring that knowledge?

Less wall-of-texty response to Soln.

1) Look, a lot of humanities courses don't have an immediate payoff where you can say something like, "I learned how mix polymers today in chem lab". If you don't like that, you not only don't like the humanities, you don't like the entire idea of a liberal arts education where some of the pay-off of that education comes in how you learn to think, and how that change in your thinking slowly percolates into your later professional life. Which is, again, a legit argument to be had about education, but don't get all bent out of shape about this one class, because you really don't like most higher education in the U.S., then.

2) However, if you want a humanities class to have an immediate technical payoff, e.g., that a student could say at the end of the class, "I can now do something that I couldn't do before", this course has a WAY bigger chance of producing that result than Chaucer 101. At the end of a traditional literature course on Chaucer, you know about Chaucer. Tell me what the immediate practical payoff of that is. At the end of this course, if it's taught well, some students might feel that they actually understand how to adapt narratives for use in other media, how to make convincing adaptations themselves, and so on. Which strikes me as being a potentially very useful and lucrative skill if you're any good at it.

Yep.  If you can't enjoy or learn from the classics, you sure as fuck better not be an english major.  Of course, they should be taught well and with passion.


In current MMORPGs, I can't think of any interesting narrative issues whatsoever.  The 'interesting narrative issues' pretty much boil down to: "How can we get this guy to kill 10 foozles over and over again and not get bored?"    LOTRO, while being slightly more interesting because it is an adaptation of a great work of literature, still exists in this sphere.  Calling it interactive is an insult to interactive fiction (yeah, I'm thinking of you, choose-your-own-adventure).  It's more like a fanfic with graphics+progress quest.

Can anyone give me a single example of anything enlightening about narrative in any game he has his kids play in this course?  LOTRO, NWN2?  I mean something that will make you think 'wow, that's great writing and something I wish to emulate', or even better, something which makes one grow in some way as a person on a metaphysical or ethical level (which I think should be the real goal of humanities).  Studying LOTRO will teach you how to adapt Lord of the Rings into a Diku MMORPG.  That's about the extent of it's usefulness, as far as I can tell.  I'd like to proven wrong though.  Perhaps, if I could take the course, the professor would enlighten me to the intricate issues involved in this 'interactive' narrative.

(My experience with pop culture analysis in english has left me quite annoyed, if you can tell).

Why is it worth learning about classic literature? Intrinsically worth it, I mean? I have a good answer to this for my own purposes, but I find a lot of people who assume that's the point of English literature or the humanities have a flotilla of totally unexamined assumptions from not really knowing why something is "classic" to what the good consequences of having a society which shares a common understanding of the classics might end up being.

On your other question. Saying that the narrative content of LoTRO or NWN sucks ass is not necessarily something I'd disagree with, but you're missing the point if you think that the course is about glorifying how aesthetically wonderful the narrative content of LoTRO is. Even in a course on classic literature, you often end up teaching works that you or other critics think are very poor in quality. A Shakespeare course may often include "A Winter's Tale", which most Shakespeare critics think sucks ass. The interesting critical question becomes, "Why do we find this an inferior work?", which turns out to be a question you need to ask if your ideas about excellence aren't just recitations of what somebody else told you was excellent.

So certainly one thing this course could ask is, "Why do stories from other media frequently become derivative or generic when they're brought into the games medium?"

But that opens up other questions: do interactive media have a fundamentally, empirically different kind of narrative than other media? Is interactive storytelling something unique that we arguably haven't learned how to do well as yet? If we're not good at it yet, why aren't we good at it? The technology? The industry? The lack of good author tools? Espen Aarseth argues that interactive narrative is fundamentally different in other ways (he calls interactivity  "ergodic narrative") and that you need really different critical and intellectual tools for understanding how it works, when it works--in his case I think he would say that you're focusing on the wrong thing if you worry about how derivative the content is, because he would argue that the structure of how you consume an ergodic narrative is way more important than its content. (Most infamous case of this argument: that the only thing that mattered about Tomb Raider was the structure of the gameplay, not the fact that Lara Croft had big tits.)

Here's another angle of it that involves MMOGs in particular: are there "emergent narratives" in MMOGs? E.g., stories that form naturally or accidentally over time out of the action of gameplay? If so, what makes for a good "emergent narrative"? Is that the same thing as "immersion"? Is there any way to describe an emergent narrative, or do you have to experience it directly yourself?

What stories might be adapted into games that haven't been, that are suited to the form of games? Are there stories in games that compare favorably with stories from other media, and what are they? What would a story that developed "natively" out of games look like, if it wasn't derived from something like Lord of the Rings, etc.  How in practical, working terms do developers adapt stories from other sources, e.g., what creative choices did the designers of LoTRO actually make, and how can you "read" those in the environment of the game? Can we talk meaningfully about what makes for a good or bad choice in that kind of adaptation?

Well, that's a good reply.  I can't argue with you too much and thinking about interactive narrative is fascinating.  However....

Is LOTRO (just as an example) even interactive narrative at all?  I'm having a hard time agreeing with this.  It seems to me that a MMORPG is no more interactive narrative than reading a book is interactive narrative because you had to go to the store to buy the book and you must flip the pages in some order.  The amount of 'interactivity' is superficial and irrelevent.

The only way to solve this is if we want to include gameplay itself as narrative, as perhaps some wish to do.  It seems to me we're just slapping labels on things that go far beyond their original meaning. 

If gameplay is narrative, then any interaction with human created systems are likely narrative as well.

Is the internet itself a sort of emergent narrative?

How about 'real life', or history?

As far as your first question, that's obviously a tough one to answer without derailing the thread incredibly.  Unlike, say, what makes good music, it's probably answerable almost purely in language, but the underlying wordless understanding is there.  (fuck you sapir-whorf).  Anyways, I'd say the classics vary in the basics in why they are valuable, but in the end are all very similar.  Some are likely more historic and a connection to a different time.  Some perhaps teach rhetoric or technical prowess.  But in the end, literature can be philosophy as art, history as art, and these inspire both connection to a higher spirit than simply that of our own zeitgeist (incredibly poorly worded here by myself), and the knowledge and growth of the human soul, speaking in Platonic terms.  Knowing what we are is the greatest thing we can do, and the classics teach us this.  Then we can know what's best for us in life.  Thanks Plato.

The point about LoTRO is well-taken, and in fact, that's a whole subset of academic argument about interactive media.  Quite a few of the scholars with an interest in the subject don't think that virtual worlds are actually a good example of the form at all. That includes the formalist critics like Aarseth and Juul, but even some of the people who are interested in "emergent narrative" within interactive media think virtual worlds are something else. It's why a lot of the interest in virtual worlds among scholars is actually among social scientists rather than humanities people.

I also think you're right that focusing this on gameplay is possibly too narrow. When I did a senior workshop for some humanities students here focused on new media and interactive media, I only did one week on games, and related them to social-networking sites, email, web pages, asynchronous forums, synchronous chat, etcetera.

Your answers to the first question are fine ones--the point is that it's not a simple given that the subject of English literature should be high art or the "classics", and even when it is, it's not always clear what makes something a classic. But I'm often fine with the idea that studies of popular culture or new cultural forms, etc., should belong under some other banner or heading. However, a lot of English departments have evolved towards including that kind of study--and *somebody* should be studying that material, and teaching it. "Nothing human is foreign to me": anything that lots of people do is by definition interesting and valid as a subject of study.

The only interactive narrative in MMOs I can think of would be RP groups which create an improvisational story.  Otherwise it's just a new, and cumbersome, mechanic to make you turn the page the way things work right now.

Totally, totally off topic but I'd just like to applaud these last few posts for being intelligent and constructive and I will deplore the day when the hoi polloi come in here and start their usual sweary abuse.

I'd also like to add to a couple of points but don't have time right at this minute which is a shame.

Keep it up. :drill:

I suspect the guy teaching the class shared that opinion -- looked like LoTR was chosen because they had the story in multiple forms (film, book, game) and thus you could do straight-up analysis. The other pairings looked to be Snow Crash and "Strange Days", and Elizabeth and The Faerie Queene -- not quite as on point.

They also did Neverwinter Nights 2 -- wouldn't have been my choice for narrative in a single person game. I'd have chosen Baldur's Gate. Or Planescape: Torment. Or Knights of the Old Republic 2 -- despite the ending -- and had them focus on the way much of the backstory was told through dialogue choices, rather than clunky exposition. It's was a very clever technique, one that uses the medium's strength (giving someone control over the dialogue) to fufill another goal entirely.

To hammer that point home, you might mention what contemporary opinion was of SEVERAL beloved classics. Quite a number of them were dismissed by their contemporary critics.

Yeah, I think he chose LoTRO for exactly that reason--the course is based on tracing what happens to narratives when they transit from one media form to the next. (Rather like my colleague's course on Beowulf across many media and across time.)    It's an especially potent example for gaming just because you can really trace different histories of adaptation--you could look at how LoTRO enters digital games through its incorporation into pen-and-paper RPGs in the 1970s which then influenced MUD design; you could look at how LoTRO enters digital games through visualizations of various character archetypes in early graphical games (elves, dwarves, wizards); and then you could look at a really recent game that is directly inspired by either the books or the Jackson films. (I'd personally finish that up by showing the class Icecrown in World of Warcraft, where the visual influence of the Jackson films is so overwhelming.) It's a really good choice given the goals of the course.

I agree for single person I'd choose something else than NWN2, but I think the NWN2 choice was probably predicated on the fact that the students could potentially create narrative using NWN2, which they can't with many of the other choices. You could maybe choose another game that comes with modding or authoring tools but that has some distinctive narrative choices in the predesigned game.

Morat pretty much summed up why everyone doing a cliched, tabloid knee-jerk reaction to this course is being dumb.

All I would add is that the shock should be if English departments were not at the forefront of those interested in imaginary worlds involving massive participation by broad swathes of society who interact with others in the creation of fiction on a public stage, largely through extemporised performances.  Add in that this is sometimes in the spoken medium but more often in one that is almost purely textual and you have something that is more challenging and relevant to many that yet more bloody Dickens.

And complaining that the students muight be doing this before reading every last item of the canon is facile.  No, I am not a cultural relativist.  Yes, I believe that Chekhov is more important (no scare quotes) than the ramblings of xX_K1llahPunk_Xx.  But this area is being used to allow the same sort of questions to be asked, perhaps in a more jarring or thought-provoking way than would otherwise be likely to occur.