I really enjoyed this class a lot! I took this course since I am a video game nerd and an education/history major. I want to be able to incorporate things I am interested in to make my classroom environment more entertaining. I certainly felt incredibly dumb at some points because of my lack of history knowledge and inexperience physically playing games. I was glad that you and my friends were so understanding and willing to help. I am so happy that I could get credits for doing something I am passionate about. It made me feel less bad about taking study breaks to play video games since I was still being productive. I really liked the McCall textbook we used; I want to read the last couple of chapters now that I have free time. I wished we used it more in class honestly because I think we could have had good discussions on it. Overall, my takeaways were that I learned a lot of history and learned how to play some games (does completing this course certify you as being an official gamer?).
The games we played were fun! My favorites were Civ 6 and Tropico 5/6. I was not a fan of Empires Total War; I believe that one should be swapped for another one (if you end up doing the course again). It is a personal bias because I could not for the life of me figure out how that game worked. The course overall was structured well. Three weeks per game was a suitable time frame. Next time, possibly have the blog posts due for class a week later. They were always a pain to get completed on time, but I greatly prefer writing them over having to do assigned readings. So, thank you for being so understanding with them. Also, it would be nice to have an assistant who has office hours where students could come in and get help learning the game if needed. Sometimes it is nicer to have someone physically help you than try learning by watching a tutorial. I get that the course is not specific for education majors, but it would have been nice to have had more games that could be used in the classroom. Yes, the point of the class was to analyze gameplay and think critically if it is historically accurate. It was just disappointing for us education majors to only get a couple of game recommendations.
I really liked the two presentations we had to do! I found them super fun and thoroughly enjoyed working on them. For my presentation on Red Dead Redemption, I was a bit nervous about my game choice initially since the game takes so long to complete. I ended up having a lot of fun over break playing the game with my brother and it took about fourteen hours since we tried to stick to the main story. That was difficult since we both just like getting lost in open worlds to find secrets. I grew up watching my brother play the game so, it was cool that we got to revisit the game again. My brother had finished playing the second one shortly before and he explained all the lore and how the stories connect. I was surprised that the story did have some historical accuracies. It was also nice to see everyone else review a bunch of games to get recommendations (like an IRL playthrough). I will defiantly be playing some of them this summer. As for the dream game project, I really enjoyed the prompt (if that is the correct word?). I am so grateful that my group clicked so well and that we all put our best effort into it. Everyone got to work on the part of the project they had their strengths in and we think that showed. We all agreed that the presentation will probably be our best and most fun project in college. It was nice that we had full creative control to just make whatever we wanted. The design of the slides will hold the record for the most time I have ever spent on a PowerPoint. I am still giddy over the questions slide that played the Beatles. One critique to limit dumb questions, have students ask someone next to them the question before asking the group presenting. It was a bit frustrating for our group to be on the receiving end of that while other groups were only asked a few questions each. Also, our group was not a fan of the class's game ranking contributing to our grade on the project. Besides these nitpicky comments, I overall had a very nice time in this course. I wish I had more time this semester to enjoy it more.
Thank you Dr. Pitt for creating this course! It was very pogchamp!