Spring

Digital and analog games are often defined in term of mechanics and systems—a feature they share with popular storytelling, which has its own genre mechanics and tried-and-true formulas. This class examines games and genre storytelling together as modes of rule-bound expression, with a special focus on games that take their inspiration from—and put their own unique mark on—genres borrowed from popular literature and cinema. How might we translate the longstanding rules of “fair play” in detective stories into game form? What is retained and what is lost from the tradition of romance novels and rom coms when dating sims gamify love? Can we laugh at our own pratfalls in slapstick games? In this course, students will play, discuss, write about, and collaboratively design their own games to answer these and other questions.

Though the web was originally conceived as an online space for sharing hyperlinked documents, the modern Web browser has evolved into a creative coding playground capable of producing all manner of networked art and algorithmic compositions. In this course we'll learn JavaScript, the Web's defacto programming language. Throughout the quarter we'll experiment with various different Web APIs for creating generative and interactive Internet art including HTML5 video, Canvas (2D/3D animations) and Web Audio. We'll learn how to produce work that responds to various input sources (trackpad/mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, cameras, microphones) and how to fetch and incorporate data from external APIs elsewhere on the Internet.

This course introduces you to the many roles that make contemporary game development work, from solo projects to small indie teams to full studio pipelines. Each week, we will dig into a different position, exploring the skills, responsibilities, and pathways that shape how games get made. You’ll research and analyze roles across disciplines and try on new hats. The course culminates in a collaborative project where you take on a role that aligns with your interests and contribute to a shared game concept.

This studio course introduces students to key theories and practices of game design. Our emphasis will be on board games, roleplaying games, and other analogue games. Through a series of collaborative projects, students will gets hands-on experience with the iterative loop - ideation, prototyping, playtesting, and evaluation - while developing familiarity with common mechanics and genres. These making opportunities will be paired with critical play sessions of preexisting games.

This hands-on class will serve as a wide-ranging introduction to “creative coding” in new media art, computer graphics, live performance and visual effects. But this is no normal class, for this is no normal time — all of these well ordered histories and practical skills are about to be transformed by AI and nobody knows what’s going to happen to “creative coding” next. What will sitting in front of a computer created with computation in these fields look like next year (or next quarter)? We’ll survey and reconsider both popular and oddball programming tactics and languages, the professional mainstream as well as historical paths not taken across visual art, music and mixed reality — all to form clues as to what might, can and should happen next to the tools we use to create with computers. And then we’ll see if we can get there first.

A hands-on studio course exploring how to critically consume, dissect, and create media in response to a fractured and fast-paced media landscape. Students will transform weekly headlines into rapid-response digital art projects, interrogating the urgency of contemporary culture through experimental design and creative critique.

This course serves as an introduction to historical videogame studies through the franchise of Sid Meier's Civilization. We will play several iterations of the game along with other historical titles like Crusader Kings and Pentiment. Readings will focus on historical game studies and game studies broadly (Chapman, Bogost, etc.), with particular emphasis on the use of systems as historical argument. We will investigate the purpose of history in these titles - its function, its relevance, and its status as historiography. A familiarity with 4X strategy games is recommended though not required.

Video games are written in code. They are inscribed into a computer's memory. Critics, designers, and enthusiasts alike refer to their mechanics as "verbs," like Super Mario's JUMP or Minecraft's BUILD. Sometimes, like other kinds of media objects, video games themselves are referred to as "texts." Starting from these premises, this course will investigate why it makes sense to use this linguistic vocabulary to describe video games. We will consider what theories of language have to teach us about video games, and what video games have to teach us about language itself and the worlds it reveals to us. Readings will include philosophers of language like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, digital media scholars like McKenzie Wark and Bo Ruberg, and literary writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Clarice Lispector. This will be a reading- and writing-heavy course: class meetings will consist of discussion of readings, and assignments will generally take the form of written responses and critical essays. Video games (or recorded video game playthroughs) may be assigned alongside films, video clips, and podcasts at low or no cost to students. This class does not require any special knowledge of video games or gaming culture! An interest in the topic is all that’s needed to succeed.

A required course for 2nd or 3rd-year students, Foundations serves as an essential introduction to the Media Arts and Design (MADD) program. It cultivates community, introduces core program values, foregrounds portfolio development, and prepares students for advanced MADD coursework. Through lectures, discussions, and collaborative activities, students will engage with the history, theory, and practice of media arts and design. This course also offers a guided exploration of MADD’s specialized “clusters.” Students will build a shared vocabulary and practical framework to explore the intersections of media art, design, and culture, preparing them to engage critically and creatively with the field.

This is a course about how environmental concepts and aesthetics are mediated using interactive technologies, from video games to computer models. The environment has long been imagined as something constituted by interactions. We can think of Charles Darwin’s figuration of a “tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth… dependent upon each other in so complex a manner” to produce new and divergent species over time. Later, such interactions were captured in mathematical and computational models, e.g. of predator-prey dynamics. In this course, we will consider the history and theory of the interactive environment alongside interactive media, a genre that includes entertainment media like video games, ecological modeling software, analog toys/games, and social media platforms. The class explores the interactivity of environments through hands-on play, tinkering, argumentation and experimentation with interactive media. Students will learn to critically analyze popular imaginaries, aesthetic objects, and the tools of scientific knowledge production, and interrogate how each contributes to urgent conversations about how we interact with nature.