During this class, students will be using Twitter to share thoughts and questions about course material. This will serve as a way for students to engage with the lecture material and even to interact with each other during lecture or while completing assignments.

You are required to tweet at least 10 time per week (tweets will be counted on Fridays), and you must use the lecture hashtag #litgames in order to get credit for your tweets. You are encouraged to retweet anything you find interesting or worthy of passing along, but a retweet does not count toward your 10 tweets. While you will not be graded on the content of your tweets, Michael will be tracking the Twitter conversation during class to make sure that your posts pertain to lecture. In addition, he will be ensuring that each student meets the minimum number of required tweets.

If you already have a Twitter account, you may use that account during lecture. You may also choose to set up a separate Twitter account for this class. Regardless, the Twitter account you use for this class cannot be "protected," and you will have to share your Twitter username with Michael.

While there are any number of ways to approach the use of Twitter in this class, here are a few suggestions for how you might approach this assignment:

• Summary: A summary of a point or argument made during lecture. This kind of tweet might summarize an argument made by the person lecturing, or it might summarize an argument that the lecturer is citing.
• Link: A link to something mentioned during lecture or to something relevant to the course material.
• Question: A question you have about material covered in class or in the readings. Michael will keep an eye on the Twitter stream, and we will try to answer your questions before, during, or after class.
• Answer: An answer to a classmate's question. Maybe you know the answer to a question asked during lecture. Why not answer it?
  

Due Date: The Tuesday after the week for which you are creating a Storify. Michael will schedule these with you at the beginning of the semester. Storifies must be submitted before class begins

Once during the semester, you will compose a summary of the week's tweets using Storify, a web service that allows you to synthesize a collection of tweets and text. Michael will provide you with a signup sheet for scheduling which week you will cover with your Storify. We'll cover how to use Storify in class.

Your lecture Storify will be worth 15% of your grade. Your job in this assignment is to identify some pattern or trend during the Twitter conversation and to synthesize some of the tweets from that week into a coherent story. You'll use Storify to embed tweets, and you'll write text that explains the trends and patterns that you've noticed. We'll use these Storifies to recap the previous week prior to starting a new week's worth of material.

When creating this Storify, keep in mind that you'll be using this tool for your final project (a Storify that documents how you and a partner traversed one of the games we're playing in class). So, this assignment offers you a chance to synthesize one week's discussion as well as a chance to become familiar with Storify. Take advantage of this opportunity as it will help you during that final project.

When evaluating this assignment, we'll be considering the following:

• Have you included at least 20 tweets from the lecture week that you're summarizing?
• Have you located some pattern (or set of patterns) from the Twitter conversation, linking together tweets into a coherent story?
• Have you used your own words to synthesize the conversation? (Your Storify should include text written by you in addition to embedded tweets, images, video, and links.)
• Have you created a Storify that is generally well written and free of grammatical errors?

Due Date: 10/7 at midnight

In D.B. Weiss' Lucky Wander Boy, Adam Pennyman is working to create what he calls The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, a collection of videogame reviews that analyze old games such as Pac-Man and Micro-Surgeon. The reviews are written in a very particular style, and D.B. Weiss seems to want to show us that Pennyman takes these games and their cultural implications very seriously (perhaps too seriously). Your task during this 750-1000 word paper (double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman) is to write your own entry for The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, imitating Pennyman's style.

You will choose which game to write about, but it must be a game that could conceivably be in Pennyman's catalog. Our cutoff date for Adam's "classical" period is any game made up to and including 1983 (the year of the videogame crash). This means that you can't write about a contemporary videogame and that you'll have to do some research on older games. In addition, you can't write about any of the games that Pennyman writes about in Lucky Wander Boy. In addition to finding a game to review, you'll need to play that game (using any number of emulators online for old game systems) and conduct some research on it.

Your entry into the Catalogue should mimic Pennyman's style in terms of both how the review looks (providing technical specifications at the beginning, etc.) and his writing style. In class, we'll discuss some strategies for imitation.

This paper will represent 25% of your grade. When grading these papers, we will be asking the following questions:

• Have you chosen an appropriate game?
• Does your catalogue entry demonstrate that you've researched and played the game?
• Does your entry look like those composed by Pennyman? Is it formatted similarly?
  
• Have you effectively imitated Pennyman's style and approach to reviewing games?
• Is your entry generally well written and free of grammatical errors?

Due Date: 11/11 at midnight

In Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, the characters move through a massive online game world called the OASIS, and the central plot focuses on an easter egg embedded in the OASIS by its creator, James Halliday. Halliday is obsessed with 1980s popular culture, and each of the puzzles he creates for the easter egg are focused on that obsession. In this project, you'll be using a platform called Twine to create your own puzzle game inspired by Halliday's various puzzles in the OASIS.

For this project, you'll work in groups of three or four, and you'll create an easter egg puzzle based not on 1980s culture but instead on contemporary popular culture. So, while Halliday was obsessed with anything from The Breakfast Club to Family Ties, you should feel free to pursue your own interests and obsessions from contemporary culture.

Regardless of what inspires your puzzle game, the goal is to create a game that calls for the player to solve puzzles in order to reach some "win" state. In addition to submitting your Twine game, you'll submit a walk-through document. This will serve as the "key" to your game. While we will be evaluating your game by playing it, these documents will help us if we get stuck.

This project will represent 25% of your grade. When grading these projects, Michael and I will be asking the following questions:

• Does your game make use of the affordances of Twine, using code to create a dynamic reading and playing experience?
• Does your game ask the player to solve puzzles in ways similar to Halliday's easter egg?
• Is the game coherent and clear? Do all of its pieces hold together? Does the player leave the experience with a clear sense of what you are trying to communicate?
• Are your project and walk-through document generally well written and free of grammatical errors?

Due Date for Braid Storify: 11/26 at noon
Due Date for Gone Home Storify: 12/10 at noon
Due Date for Final Revised Storify and Cover Letter: 12/16 at noon

Our final unit has included the games Braid and Gone Home, each of which use the videogame medium differently to tell stories. In this project, you'll pair up with one person from class "livetweet" the process of playing the game and then to create a Storify that synthesizes all of those tweets. Together with your partner, you will be creating Storifies for both of these games, but only one will be submitted for the final project. This will give you an opportunity to choose which Storify you'd like to submit for credit, and it will also mean that you'll have an opportunity to revise the Storify that you decide to submit. When you submit your revised Storify, you will also submit a 250-word cover letter explaining your revision. This document should explain what you changed and why you changed it.

You should plan several gameplay sessions with your partner. One group member should be playing the game, while the other is livetweeting the action. Members should change roles often. The tweets are an opportunity to record your progress and insights about the game, note when you are stuck or how you solved certain puzzles or problems, point out "light bulb moments" during gameplay, and connect the game to class readings. You should also link to other texts or resources (for example, texts, songs, or films alluded to during the game or pieces others have written about the game). Much like lecture tweets, you should use Twitter in whatever way works best for you and in ways that shed light on your group's experience of playing the game.

After completing the game, your group will create a Storify that synthesizes all of your game tweets and tells the story of how you finished or "solved" the game. The Storify does not have to encompass the entire game--you can choose a section of the game to focus on as you compile tweets and other resources for the Storify.

Your Storify should also incorporate relevant sections from First-Person, and it can also incorporate sources you discover on your own. All group members should contribute to all portions of the project (playing the game, livetweeting, composing the Storify).

This project will represent 20% of your grade. The breakdown is as follows:

Braid Storify: 5% (Credit/No Credit)
Gone Home Storify: 5% (Credit/No Credit)
Final Revised Storify and Cover Letter: 10%

When grading these projects, Michael will be asking the following questions:

• Does your Storify identify a central theme that arose during gameplay?
• Does the Storify include what your group discovered and struggled with while playing the game?
  
• Does your Storify incorporate various media to tell your story, including Tweets, images, and video?
• Does your Storify demonstrate that you've conducted research by connected the game to sources we have read in class and sources that you've discovered on your own?
• Is your Storify generally well written and free of grammatical errors?