Video Games and Remixes: Audience Participation

Up until the 1970s, we experienced practically every form of popular entertainment in just about the same way. You sit in a living room, theater, or stadium, and you take in what's going on. You could cheer, boo, or leave, but it wasn't really going to affect what was happening.

For that reason, mass media has been criticized for turning its audience into passive, zombie-like consumers, with one hand on the remote and the other in a bag of Cheetos.

And then—oh snap—here come video games.

All of the sudden we're smashing coin blocks with our heads, hurling sticky bombs with our Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, and watching Pokémon go head to head. We're active participants in our games, and that changes everything, from the kinds of stories we receive to the ways that we relate to our art and artists, and even the way we interact with each other in virtual spaces.

And then—double snap—we decide that playing around isn't enough, and when the right technology comes along, everyone starts jacking pieces of existing culture and swapping, sampling copying, chopping and screwing, and autotuning it to our hearts' content.

Audiences have become artists. It's the cultural remix, and it's got some people pretty worked up. Some call it the death of creativity, some call it piracy, and some think it's just a pretty fun way to make new kinds of art.

In this course, you'll tackle intros, readings, and activities that will allow you to

• get a broad sense of all the different genres of modern video games.
• figure out why video games and gamers get such a bad reputation.
• debate the phenomena of video game violence and addiction, and what, if anything, our society should do about them.
• use the concepts of ludology and narratology to help analyze video games.
• learn how video games are transcending pure entertainment and getting involved in other parts of our lives.
• consider how technology enables new forms of narrative and storytelling, like literary mashups, and cut-ups.
• understand the responsibilities of borrowing and using other people's creative work in your own work.
• think through how memes, ideas, and conversations develop as they spread virally online.
• speculate on the future of pop culture, in light of the ways that it borrows from its past.

Press "Shmoop" to start.

Unit Breakdown