Name: Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative
Brand: Vanderbilt University
Availability: OnlineOnly
Rating: 4.6 (57 reviews)

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4.6

stars

201 ratings

About the Course

Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media. The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others. Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games....

Top reviews

Jan 10, 2017

I am really grateful for the course that gave me the idea and theorethical background to create a transmedia experience with my daughters around the Hobbit and Lotro

Jun 24, 2022

Te explicna muy bien todos los puntos del la literatura adentro de los videojuegos, peliculas y poemas.Muy buena descripcion en cada uno de los videos

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51 - 57 of 57 Reviews for Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

By Karole-Anne C

•

Apr 13, 2021

Comprehensive, interesting course. Doesn’t rely heavily on gaming, so those who are more comfortable with literature are engaged. The video format added to the experience.