4 | 2/4 | Podcast brainstorming and planning | |
2/6 | Ian Bogost “Media Microecology” and “Empathy” from How to Do Things with Videogames | ||
2/8 | Side Quest 2: What’s in Your Bag? |
In class today, we did much of the work of laying out the structure for the class podcast, which we have decided to call “Playing Yourself: The Rhetoric of Games.” I’ve created a Google Drive folder and shared it with everyone who has so far filled out the information survey I posted last week (if you haven’t completed the survey, please do so now). In that folder right now are two documents, one for planning out the remaining details necessary before we can begin publishing our podcast episodes and an episode schedule.
Podcast Schedule
I’ve divided you up into 8 groups (list of groups at the end of the document). The first 8 episodes need to be published between 2/15 and 3/8, so please fill in your group number next to one of those first 8 episodes — you don’t have to know which of you will be lead and which will be assistant yet nor do you need to know what the subject of the episode is yet, but at least claim one slot for your group.
Podcast Planning
We need to draft the script for our series bumper and we need a square image that iTunes will publish as the cover for the podcast. I’ve pasted into the planning document 3 examples of podcast bumpers from previous semesters and 4 previous podcast images we’ve used. I will add additional links to some potential music for the bumper soon, hopefully today. Please take a crack at drafting a script for our podcast in that document based on the discussion of what we’ll be doing in the series from today. Even if it’s language that needs to be cleaned up eventually — let’s all throw some language up in that document that we can work from.
Wednesday
We’ll continue discussion of podcast episode, hopefully finalize the bumper script, discuss visuals and music, and answer any remaining questions about scenario/workflow/whatever.
We will also discuss Ian Bogost’s chapters. Please bring either a hard copy of the two essays or a digital copy that you can read and annotate in class — we’ll hopefully get into some pretty detailed discussion of Bogost’s argument so you will need to have read it carefully and be able to bring up the documents in front of you as we discuss them.
Also in class on Wednesday, we’ll discuss the assignment for next week, when you’ll be playing the game Gone Home and liveblogging the experience. More about that on Wednesday.