Play Worlds: Games as Model Systems
This course was designed and taught as an upper-division Digital Game Development course offering in the UC Davis Cinema and Digital Media department. It incorporates historical material on the use of games in modeling practices ranging from Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and China to contemporary machine learning and simulation technology. It also teaches texts in media studies and game studies by Henry Jenkins, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Alenda Chang, Souvik Mukherjee, Edward Castronova, Patrick Crogan, Mark R. Johnson, Claus Pias, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, Timothy Lenoir and Luke Caldwell, and Reed Berkowitz. By pairing these readings in the history and study of games with game design instruction and projects ranging from Virtual Reality to Alternate Reality and tabletops, this class invites students to bring practice-based insights into their historical research, and to consider the longer historical trajectories of contemporary technologies and social formations.
Designing Systems: Introduction to Digital Game Development
This course was designed and taught as an upper-division Digital Game Development course offering in the UC Davis Cinema and Digital Media department. Focusing on a holistic understanding of digital games as computational systems, it teaches knowledge in game development software like Unity3D, modeling software like Blender, and sound production software like Audacity, supplemented by state-of-the-art generative AI for prototyping scene design, writing code, producing images, and synthesizing sound and speech files. This course also introduces critical texts and concepts from leading scholars and developers of games, including Don Carson, Henry Jenkins, Alison Harvey, Alenda Chang, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Kishonna L. Gray, and John Staats.
Brainwashed: Propaganda, Public Relations, and Paranoia in 20th Century Fiction
This course was designed and taught as a “Topics in Fiction” offering for the UC Davis English Department. It traces the institutional development of state and corporate propaganda in the twentieth century through an examination of media objects. The course teaches media analysis and close reading techniques through the analysis of novels, poetry, comics and graphic novels, music, photography, and video games.
Games of Resistance: Why Play Matters in Post-Colonial South Korea
This course was designed and taught as part of the First Year Seminar Program at UC Davis. It is listed as a “CURE” (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience), intended to introduce new students to research topics and methodology. Through an examination of different games and types of play before, during and after the Japanese colonization of Korea, it introduces histories and concepts of race, colonialism, and global capitalism into the study of game forms, strategies, and cultures.