2017-18 Academic Catalog

Games are ubiquitous to all human cultures. They provide the framework for our communities (both real and virtual), they reflect and reinforce our values, and they enable us to behave in ways that our everyday lives don’t allow. In this course, we’ll examine the ways that games can distract us from the "real world," but also how they can help us to learn, to collaborate, and to express ourselves more effectively. We’ll draw on readings from multiple genres, and students will employ a variety of research methods to analyze games from social, textual, and design perspectives.

This interdisciplinary course addresses one of the signal features of contemporary academic, professional, public, and personal life: a reliance on information and arguments involving numbers. We will examine how numbers are used and misused in verbal, statistical, and graphical form in discussions of world events, health, science, and social issues.