DUE: 12-5-13 @ Midnight
TL;DR- Write about how your understanding of games and writing/composing has changed this semester (if at all), you can earn 150/100 points for this if you are thorough.
The final blog... can you believe it??? We've made it to the end! Almost.... there....
So, as usual for my final blog of the semester, I want you to use this as an opportunity to reflect back on the semester a bit. It's hard (even for me) to remember back to when you were all here on day one, and some of you had barely played a game at all. Crazy in retrospect, right? Here we are, a bunch of quirky, bizarre, fun games later, with a good few projects under our belts. But.... what does it all mean? That's a question for you to answer.
For your final blog, I want you to think about (and then write about, naturally) what you learned about games and writing this semester, whatever that may be. Allow me to immediately follow that statement up by saying that there is nothing I want more than a contrived "conversion narrative"; I'm not the gaming missionary, bringing the all-loving wisdom and knowledge of the great texts known as videogames to you, and you're not the lowly, sad, unknowing student who could only see the light through my tutilege.
You came to class most days, you played games, you thought about them, you wrote papers, created images, created games, and generally thought about games in new or different ways. Similarly, you should have thought about writing in different ways; it's not all research papers and 5-paragraph essays. Writing (or as we tend to call it in the biz "composing") is a much more nuanced process than that, and there's a big push in the field towards learning to write and read in digital contexts, and I hope that's what we've done here. I want you to think about how your views on games and writing may have changed throughout the course of the semester, and why/how.
That said, I also extend this as an opportunity for reflection and careful consideration, and as such, I will award up to 150/100 points. That's right, I'm providing a chance for you to earn back 50 points by providing thorough reflection and maybe including an image or video or two. If you've missed a blog or two or done them late, this is a last-minute chance to earn back some of those points. Take your time with this, and post before the final day of class ends.
I'll probably say it again at least once, but both sections I'm teaching right now are genuinely the best courses I've ever taught, and the best classes of students I've ever had, and I wanted to thank everyone for making that possible. It has been intensely rewarding to see your progress this semester, and I've never had more fun teaching before (even when I did this class in the spring), and for that, I thank you, and hope you had as much fun as I did.