Über die freie Online-Kurs Plattform Coursera bietet Prof. Jay Clayton, Professor für Anglistik an der Vanderbilt Universität in Tennessee, einen Kurs über das Lord of the Rings Online Spiel an. “Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative” beschäftigt sich damit, was mit Geschichten und Filmen passiert, wenn sie in ein Online-Spiel umgewandelt werden. Der Kurs startet am 9. September 2013 und geht über sieben Wochen. Die Teilnahme am Kurs ist kostenfrei.
Kursbeschreibung
Screenshot – www.lotro.com
Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and hard-core gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media. We will study The Lord of the Rings Online™ (LOTRO) against the backdrop of other games such as Final Fantasy, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Skyrim; narrative theory, intermediality, and game theory; poems by Spenser, Coleridge, Keats, and Browning; fiction by Tolkien and others; and art since the Pre-Raphaelites that has influenced the neo-medievalism of much fantasy literature and gaming.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.
