Well, here's some good news: More colleges are offering videogame-related courses. Apparently, most courses focus on computer graphics, but others are more game specific. Obviously, we're still very much in a "foot in the door" situation with videogame studies in college curriculums, though I'm excited by these beginnings. I've been discussing videogames a lot in my computers and english class here at SCSU, but would like even better to teach an even more game-centric course--perhaps a course in "reading" videogames or even writing them (interactive fiction would probably be the easiest, though there are plenty of DIY kits out there to practically automate the game design process for more ambitious projects.)
I'm convinced that any college program that doesn't at least attempt to introduce students to videogame studies is doing them a disservice. Videogames are teaching new skills that will be vital in the years to come--indeed, perhaps they're teaching more important skills than those taught in universities.
Interactive Fiction
Ihave taught IF authoring in several classes. There are plenty of tutorials, and I helped edit a tutorial in the Inform language, which is available as a free PDF. It is a bit of a challenge first to teach students how to read and appreciate the finer points if IF, and then also to teach them to create it. Even though the DIY systems do help students get up and running quickly, I've found that showing students the best games, then teaching them all the things that they won't be able to do with a DIY system, takes a lot of effort. Students are very reluctant to map out their story in advance, or to submit imaginary game transcripts for me to critique, so that when they actually sit down to start programming, it takes far more time than they expected. If you do get to the point of putting together a sylabus, I'd be happy to go into more detail, if you think it would be helpful.
Dennis G. Jerz
Jerz's Literacy Weblog
Theorizing Games
Yeah I agree that it's both exciting and discouraging whenever I see news that more schools are offering games courses. I always think "OH! This is great!" but then I realize that they're talking about TRAINING and not necessarily videogame studies, per se.
This has been an ongoing debate for many years among the folks on the "Education Committee" of the International Game Developers' Association (which, incidentally, has a lot of academics on its committee). See http://www.igda.org/academia/ for details. The industry wants to train people in how to make games (a la Electronic Arts giving money to places like USC and the University of Central Florida) but academics want to train people to "read" and study games as texts. It's kind of a weird space right now.
Add to that that within literacy studies there are folks studying games as texts, players playing games, and designers making games. Several subcategories emerging when we say the phrase "studying games." It means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and that trend is growing larger by the month, it seems.
OK but I'm babbling. Back to the dissertation.
-Alice
Alice J. Robison
PhD Candidate, Rhetoric & Composition Studies
Founding Member and Researcher, Room 130 and GAPPS
http://labweb.education.wisc.edu/room130
http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html
University of Wisconsin-Madison