Today’s Plan:
- Sicart Summary Paper
- Sicart’s Ethical Gaming Criteria
- Homework
Sicart Summary Paper
So our first paper is one of the most basic in academia: the academic summary paper. Sometimes this is called a review essay. Whatever you call it, the principles are fairly simple: you condense a few hundred pages of someone else’s ideas into a few thousand words. You do the reading and lay out its claims, methods, evidence, and recommendations as clearly and concisely as possible so someone else doesn’t have to read the whole thing to have a strong understanding.
Put simply: Your task is to use our readings to identify and explain what Sicart believes makes an ethical game. Your paper needs to address at least these three overarching elements:
Player Complicity
Meaningful Choices / Wicked Problems
Reflection
We can think of these elements across two different vectors: developers and players. As you are generating ideas for the paper, think about what Sicart tells us about both developer and player responsibility for all three of these elements. (And feel free to use material from our collective document!).
Also, be sure to check out those lists of questions Sicart provides on pages (I think) 108-110.
Your summary should contain a quote or paraphrase from each assigned reading (the article, 5-28, 62-77, 91-101, 104-110). It might take you several paragraphs to discuss each element above–they have many moving parts, and a paragraph should really be about one idea.
Sicart’s Ethical Gaming Criteria
I want to go through our workspace and share/discuss the quotes that you’ve added. I expect that will take about 30 minutes. I will then give you the rest of class to start drafting your Sicart Summary paper.
Homework
For homework I’d like you to play Episode 1 of the Walking Dead. The game should take you about 90 to 120 minutes. After you finish playing through the episode, complete the discussion post in Canvas.
Your homework for next week will be to complete the Sicart summary paper. That paper is due next Friday.
