Ian here—

What follows is a two-part post, combining lesson plans from two separate days of my course “Comparative Media Poetics: Cinema and Videogames.” The learning objectives for the course centered around three main analytical questions, which animated the course and which students were expected to respond to in their written assignments. When looking at a given text, the course asked: 1) How is this particular film or particular game put together? 2) What effects and functions are engendered by its specific construction? 3) How has the historical development of the medium shaped this construction?

All three of these questions come together in a particularly potent way during this week, where we took a close look at game developers who developed a visual style out of technological necessity, but then paired that style with a genre that worked well with its specific effects. On the agenda: 1990s-era survival horror games.

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