I’ve been flattered to see so many courses in media studies and related fields adopt my 2011 book How to Do Things with Videogames so quickly. But my favorite use of the book in a classroom thus far comes from Mark Sample’s Videogames in Critical Contexts course.

He’s assigned his students to write a “missing chapter” for the book. Here’s the prompt:

In How to Do Things with Videogames Ian Bogost presents twenty different actions or sentiments that videogames can foster. Surely there are more. For this project you will write a missing chapter of How to Do Things with Videogames. While each of Bogost’s chapters are approximately 2,500 words, your own missing chapter should be about 2,000 words. Your goal is to follow the form and style of the original chapters, but to venture a single new “thing” to do with videogames.

The assignment goes on to suggest a number of features of the book’s chapters that students should consider adopting, including a brief historical or theoretical overview, a “pivot point” into games, the inclusion of multiple games, giving way to a focus on one or two specific examples, discussed in more detail.

I realize this is a bit of a self-aggrandizing thing to blog about, but I just thought it was such a great idea, I had to share it. From my perspective, the assignment also does some rhetorical work for me: in the book, I try to make clear that the applications of games discussed therein are meant as samples rather than as a complete catalog. The very idea of more chapters helpfully underscores this point.

Mark’s students’ essays are due in another two weeks or so. I hope I’ll be able to read some of them.

published April 1, 2012

Comments

  1. Glenn

    With the student’s permission, you should maybe post some of the essays.