Analysis of Play, August 29th, 2014

August 29, 2014

Today

1) Announcements: FFL and draft, HabitRPG, bloggin’

2) Gameplay experiences: overview3) Analysis 1: YOUR theory of play4) Discussion: Juul, circles and playing5) Homework

Football

You should have received an invite to the Fantasy Football league. If not– talk to me near the end of class.

We will auto-draft Saturday night or Sunday (ESPN is weird about allowing times to be set). Please rank your players and positions as you wish by Saturday at 5pm. I’ll make sure the draft isn’t before that.

HabitRPG

HabitRPG made a chump out of me. The inviting didn’t work (sigh). So I’ve created a new guild that I triple-checked for public status. Please login to Habit and join the guild “Dr. Phill’s AoP”

I will set the challenge for class over the weekend, and we’ll join up and get started with that on Wednesday.

Blogging

Also, your blog requirement won’t start until next week. So your first post is due next Wednesday.

Remember that Wednesdays are posts about something interesting from class/related to class and Fridays are responses to the readings.

You’re welcome to do a reading response this week for practice and the love of the game.

Gameplay Experience

I want to take some time to go over our gameplay experiences again and talk about the “goals” for them. There are three goals:1) Play and observe2) Reflect3) Discuss

Gameplay Experience

The “playing” part will be assigned in various ways.The reflecting and response should happen on the course website, where the gameplay experiences are posted. You can respond to each post. As long as you are logged into Facebook or Twitter, it will import your name. Just post, respond to other posts, etc.

I will grade these every couple of weeks. They don’t have hard/fast due dates, but you need to reflect no more than a week AFTER you play.

Analysis 1

This leads us to your first analysis essay. The prompt is deceptively simple: I want you to detail your personal theory of play.

What does that mean? It means answer this question: “what does PLAY mean to you, and why do you value play? What does play do?”

This should be 4-5 pages. It’s due Sept. 26th

Readings

I want to start by looking at the Juul reading, as he offers us a tool that while we might agree or disagree with it (oooh! Let’s do that!) is easy to apply.

Juul’s definition is on the next slide.

Game per Juul

And remember…

We also learned about the “magic circle.”

Sooo…

Let’s test a few games with Juul’s definition.

The question: does the definition work?

If time permits…

With our remaining time, let’s begin the task of defining the word “play.” As we do so, feel free to fire up League of Legends (or use the time to create your account so you can play later).

For Wednesday

Remember to play! You have fantasy football to adjust for a draft then to set line-ups for (we’ll discuss line-ups in class Wednesday). You can and should League, and you can get your photo-bombs going.

Read: McGonigal, Caillois, Rodriguez, and Frasca (see schedule and Niihka)

Enjoy Labor Day weekend!