The most significant component of your grade will come from the thematic essay due at the end of the course. Your essay should be approximately 1000 words in length (plus or minus 100 words). This is for the main text: your bibliography and any images and data visualizations are separate from this word limit. You will need to include a bibliography (any major reference system is fine, but it should be a proper bibliography with names, dates, and titles of sources). Papers should be submitted via Canvas as pdf or Word documents.
As the video game industry has grown, so have the communities surrounding it. Today communities exist in some way for the biggest online multiplayer game, the smallest single player indie game and everything in between. In writing your thematic essay, consider the communities that have formed around friendly or competitive play in video games. In this project, your job is to examine a gaming community and reflect on what that community reveals about digital gaming today.
To ground your discussion in real-life gameplay, choose a community that you belong to, are familiar with, or have learned about for this essay. Your community can be as large or as small as you want, but be sure to say why it is a community. For example: it might be a group of people who know each other only as avatars within a game. Or a group of people who know each other in person AND play games together. Or a group of people who don’t necessarily play together, but who share thoughts about a specific game on Reddit or YouTube or other platforms for discussion. You might also think of communities in terms of streaming on Twitch. Some of these are competitive (and, at times, very intense) while others are friendly, laid-back, and more welcoming to newcomers. You might use COVID as a backdrop, showing how you and others have engaged with other gamers when in-person gatherings have been limited.
Using your community as a way to think about larger themes, you might consider topics such as:
The impact of the pandemic on gaming communities
The good and the bad aspects of gaming communities
The impact have gaming communities had on game development
Within these topics, you might consider such questions as:
How difficult is it to join this community?
How does this community navigate its digital space? Why is the platform the community exists on important?
Is a gaming community similar or different from a more traditional community that you are a part of?
Do these communities serve any purpose for an individual or even the game?
These topics and questions serve as starting points, not as limitations to potential essay themes.
The thematic essay needs to include at least four good external sources (external = not on the course reading list). What makes a good source? You can start by looking at the kinds of readings we’ve used in this course. Some are smart long-form journalism, others are academic studies, and others are from good books. Feel free to use other pieces you find at those sites.
The proposal has 2 sources already
add another 2 from your choice to be a total of 4 sources.
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