Video lecture for week 3 of CMST 10100, “Introduction to Film Analysis.”
Author: Ian Bryce Jones
Intro to Film Week 2 Video Lecture: Mise-en-scène
The first full video lecture for CMST 10100 “Introduction to Film Analysis,” on the topic of mise-en-scène.
Videogames and Genre Storytelling Week 2 Video Lecture: Special Topics in Horror and Character Alignment
Please find some time to view this 22-minute video lecture between now and our Zoom conference call, which will convene at the normal time. You can expect our Zoom conference call to be shorter and more discussion-based as a result.
Intro to Film: Preliminary mini-lecture
A preliminary mini-lecture for CMST 10100 “Introduction to Film Analysis,” in advance of our first official full video lecture.
Blog Re-organization for Online Teaching
Ian here—
Just a quick heads-up that I’m doing some minor re-organization to this blog in response to the shift to remote learning this quarter at U Chicago. It’s not exactly unusual to see student posts on this blog, but now they’ll be accompanied by a swath of asynchronous video lectures I’ve been putting together. It’s going to be a real firehose of activity, making up for a dry spell over here since December.
If you’d just like to see the usual announcements about general-audience video essays and things like that, click the helpful “Posts by Ian” tab to clear out the online teaching material.
HER STORY Complete Transcript
Ian here, cooped up during the shelter-in-place order and busy prepping for this quarter’s classes.
So I did that thing again, where I’m preparing to teach and/or critically analyze a game, make a guide for myself, and I figure I might as well put it online for public consumption. This time, it’s a complete transcript of all of the video assets in HER STORY, Sam Barlow’s 2015 full-motion video adventure that plays devious games with its script, before it ever adopted video format.
If you’ve ever wanted to fill in a pesky block in the HER STORY‘s in-game Database Checker while chasing the “Detective Chief Inspector” achievement, this guide is for you. As for me, it will be a course tool when I teach the game again this quarter, and it forms the research backbone of my next video essay.
Too Rigged to Fail
A belated third entry in my video series on detective games. The pace of these has been slow, but I’m going to have to step it up, as these are intimately related to course prep for a course I’m teaching in the Spring term of 2020.
Script below the jump.
Continue readingMacpocalypse
Ian here—
For years now, I’ve wanted to update the section of my site devoted to games that can be easily integrated into syllabi. I was laying low until the firehose of my students’ work turned off, but I figured since I’m teaching another games-related course in Spring 2020 it would be a good time to return to the subject.
Unfortunately, the past few months have brought with them a significant new hurdle.
By now it’s old news that Chrome will be dropping Flash compatibility in December 2020. I’ve seen the pop-up, and I’ve gradually made peace with the fact that games like Loneliness, Problem Attic, and The Artist Is Present won’t be accessible to students in the future. It’s a major loss for free, platform-agnostic games that could be easily assigned. But with the release of macOS Catalina in October, with its 64-bit requirements for all applications, I’m now forced to grapple with the fact that Mac, as a platform, is all of a sudden much less friendly to indie games than it had been for much of the past decade.
I’ve seen a few guides online to what is and isn’t broken by the strict 64-bit requirements of Catalina, but most of them are light on indie games (especially non-Steam indie games). So I went ahead and personally checked all of the games listed in my “practical pedagogical notes” section, and all of the games from my “games of the decade” list (including the honorable mentions). I’ve also added things that I’ve written about, included in a video, or done a capsule review of. Below the fold you’ll find a list of 32-bit games that no longer function on macOS Catalina. I’ll update the list as I test more, or if developers get around to updating them.
Inspect-’em-Ups: Genre Core and Periphery
One last post for September: I did indeed succeed in getting the second part of my new series on detective games out of the door by the end of the month. And it’s a long one, too! Long enough that I don’t feel bad about the dry spell that’s inevitably going to set in in October.
I’ve written about most of the games in this video on the blog before, mostly for things like capsule reviews and walkthroughs. This is the only time I’ve done any sort of analysis of them, though. (Excepting maybe Gone Home.) In addition to being long, it’s also mostly brand-new material, which is not something I can say about most of my videos.
Script below the jump.
The Detective’s Gaze
I’ve inaugurated a new video series, on detective games. The inaugural video is an extended version of this old conference presentation, buffed up with new examples and more extensive sources. The second video will be arriving shortly—I knew I’d be super busy as soon as all three of my current jobs kicked in, so I planned ahead and worked on two videos simultaneously during the summer months, both of which I’m hoping to get out the door in September.
Script below the jump.
Intermittent Mechanism 