Games and Play in American Culture

Games are often treated as distractions: private amusements, children's pastimes, or cultural ephemera. This course examines the multitude of functions games serve in American culture– not only as rules and objects, but also social practices, commercial products, literary figures, legal problems, technologies, rituals, simulations, and ways of organizing conflict. The study of games offers many ways to ask how Americans define freedom, competition, chance, skill, work, leisure, fairness, and social order. This class explores how games and gameplay have evolved in the United States, from early analog tabletop games to modern digital activities, examining their cultural, social, and technological influences and impact. We will be looking at foundational games and other influences in American gaming, the advent and migration of wargames and games-as-training, the rise of tabletop roleplaying games and home gaming, and the impact of the success of arcade, home console, and online multiplayer games within the digital space. The course analyzes how mechanics, narratives, and player-driven communities reflect the historical contexts of their time and the shifting values of the cultures from which they emerged. We will consider games from a multifaceted perspective, viewing them alternatively as art, education, entertainment, economic products, psychological motivators, and transmedia connection points. Through critical readings, gameplay analysis, and discussion, students will learn to understand games not only as recreational activities, but as the meaningful cultural artifacts which they represent. The global, ancient, and universal nature of gaming supplies concepts and institutions that later American game cultures inherit, commercialize, contest, and transform. Throughout the course, students will read games themselves as historical evidence, through the medium of “actual plays,” asking questions such as who was invited to play, who wrote the rules, who did the work, what forms of knowledge the games made possible, and what kinds of social worlds did the games ask players to inhabit.