The Fall 2009 semester is over, final grades are in, and we're all catching our breath before plunging into Spring 2010. At this point, I like to post a final blog entry to try and sum up the semester from my point of view. Also, though this class blog will remain active indefinitely, I often find that students rarely make use of online discussion platforms of communities after the main reason for it's existence (class) has been completed.

Thus, this blog entry is directed both at my students and at whoever happens to find this blog, perhaps months from now, and wonder what's going on.

This semester, my third at UMW has gone by fast, but then again, that's what semesters always seem to do. For this seminar, that rapidity meant that there were some things we didn't have time to do, and some things we did do that I wish we'd taken more time to do well. When I look back over the schedule, I see reminders of many interesting discussions and projects, but I also see missed opportunities that I hope I can structure better in future iterations of this seminar.

In this seminar, we sought to better understand a videogame canon, and then add to it by producing our own. I like the list, and I liked our process of arriving at it. The only missing piece (what I'm alluding to above as well) was a lack of critical reflection on the process. We simply didn't have enough time to engage in the deep, contextual thinking required to evaluate our evaluations -- to understand how our value judgments are influenced by culture, perspective, ideology. This is not to say that these topics didn't come up. They did. I just felt on a few occasions that the work set up for us prevented a more careful and inclusive consideration.

Ultimately, though in my heart of academic hearts I remain skeptical about the project of canonization (philosophically), the pedagogical potential for a critical practice relevant to canonization is too exciting to avoid. Moreover, videogames already are a valuable part of culture, and we don't need top ten lists to tell us that. Goodness knows we have enough of those this time of year. So its obvious that the value of a canon must lie in the process, not the product, and that's something I look forward to working with more next time around. Furthermore, as an English person (I teach in the English department), I bring a set of critical tools and values focused toward treating games as texts, and that's something to be more reflective about in my own preparation for the class. For example, I frequently found myself insisting on textual analysis from my students, because to my mind that orientation is already built in to the project of preservation -- which is what the canon is about, in practical terms. So that's the kind of critical, reflective question to bring more explicitly to the seminar table next time around.

Finally, I want to publicly thank my students. Most of them worked very hard and I think they are bright, interesting people with great careers ahead of them. some recent blogs have noted the shift from "just playing" to playing with a critical eye, and I'm glad to see it. Sure, games are usually fun (not always), and we should enjoy them for their aesthetic values. But at the same time, we can and should be thoughtful. In fact, critical thinking should be present in all areas of our lives, and since most of the class self-identifies as gamers, gaming is a pretty big area of our lives.

Game on!

• zach whalen's blog
• Quote