This course will examine contemporary trends in theorizing digital media with particular attention given to software and the video game as new media texts. The semester will be divided into two units. The first unit will address theories of code and software. We will discuss the concept of “software studies” in relation to traditional media studies, and investigate how code and software can be examined as aesthetic and political texts. Through an examination of code and semiotics, software and ideology, and critiques of particular software programs, we will lay a theoretical foundation for the investigation of our second unit: video games. Following the rise of the “serious game movement” we will investigate the emergence of political games, persuasive games, simulation games, newsgames, art games, etc., in relation to the theoretical Concepts we developed while analyzing Software and code.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Open Source Games

In light of my recent presentation I felt it was appropriate to mention another phenomenon besides modding that's going on right now:

http://www.wesnoth.org/

"Battle for Wesnoth" is an open source developed turn based strategy game that is released for free and not commercially developed. Although the game itself is not very rhetorically interesting in the context of most of the things we talk about in class, its means of distribution and development are. Furthermore, it comes with its own editing tools along with source code, making its "open sourceness" readily available on multiple levels of computer knowledge. I'm going to look a little more into this but in the meantime enjoy that game along with a wikipedia list of other open source games out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games

Posted by Jason The Lee at 11:37 AM

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