Playful Media Cultures

Course goals

The goal of this course is to provide students with a thorough understanding of games and play to increase students’ playful – ludic – literacy skills as well being able to employ notions of games and play as ‘lenses’ that they can use to investigate contemporary culture and forms of media use in a broader sense. While there is certainly attention for more traditional entertainment games, the course offers ample attention for applied games, forms of gamification, and other media phenomenon in general we can consider playful in nature.

After having completed this course, students 1) have gained specialized knowledge of and insight into game, play and playful media studies; 2) are able to independently identify, analyse (= analysis), and evaluate (= critique) relevant research objects that relate to current debates in play and game studies as well as relevant media theory, and 3) present their findings (= creation) to an audience composed of specialists as well as non-specialists in written and oral forms of academic expression.

Content

In contemporary media and culture, play is no longer an activity limited to games. Rather, it has become a key characteristic of the use of social media, apps, interactive films and documentaries, mobile technology, educational software, VR applications and so on. Through their design, these media technologies invite, even urge, users to participate playfully, creating what has been called a ‘ludification of culture’ (Raessens 2012), which holds that play has become an inextricable element of our postmodern culture and post-fordist (creative) economy. Within the course, we aim to enable students to conceptualize player experiences as well as interpret games as metaphors for and models of the cultures they emerge from. Not just games but all forms of ludic media can therefore be investigated in an effort to understand contemporary ludic media literacy. This becomes increasingly relevant as wee see technology, play and active citizenship become increasingly entangled through new forms of pervasive (social) media design, playful participatory culture, civic engagement and activism (Glas et al. 2019). The notion of ‘players’ thereby will be used in a broader sense than merely ‘gamers’ but incorporates playful forms of (social) media activity, virtual reality experiences, playful apps, interactive film experiences on Netflix and so on. This course does not aim to provide an introduction to game studies as an academic field but rather to put students in the position to productively combine aspects of games and play with their own genuine research interests.

Students will work in teams to present on playful media phenomena related to weekly changing themes, engaging with the ongoing discourse within and around these phenomena. Staff members will also present their own work within these themes, which includes social and civic issues, knowledge and literacies, interactive media production and beyond. For the individual assignment, students are asked to take such critical discussions as their starting point, formulate a theoretical framework, and analyse a specific playful media object using forms of textual and affordance analysis.  

This MA course expresses Utrecht University’s focus on and contribution to societal challenges and aims to provide insights and skills that are practically valuable within that area.  

Additional information

This course is open only to students enrolled in the MA Programme New Media & Digital Culture or the MA Programme Film and Television Cultures.