CTCS 478 Culture, Technology and Communication
Interactivity Across Media
Spring 2026 / Units: 4.0
Tuesdays, 2:00 – 5:50 SCA 316
Instructor: Kiki Benzon (she/they)
Office Hours: by appointment
Contact Info: kbenzon@cinema.usc.edu
Teaching Assistant: Yifei Li
Contact: yli56130@usc.edu
Course Description
How do we play, watch, and participate in stories today? This course explores how interactivity shapes our experiences across video games, cinema, television, themed environments, and social media platforms. We will consider how the increasingly interactive nature of contemporary media blurs the boundaries between creators and audiences, reflecting broader shifts in entertainment production and participatory culture. The cross-pollination of cinema and games will be of special interest to us: while video games have long drawn upon cinematic conventions to construct immersive, narratively rich environments, cinematic interactivity has remained largely experimental, reaching wider audiences only in recent years through Netflix products like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. With a new wave of film-game fusions (Immortality, Until Dawn), we are seeing the emergence of a new media form that balances cinematic and interactive storytelling modes. Through media analysis and creative exercises, students will explore how interactivity functions as both a cultural logic and a communicative practice, shaping the ways we experience and understand media today.
Learning Objectives
You will emerge from this course with
- an enhanced understanding of interactive media modalities and their function in cultural evolution and exchange
- a grounding in media theory and design practice
- an awareness of how interactive media variously inform, resist, or sustain power relations at the intersections of race, class, and gender
- insight into the interactive affordances of digital and analog technologies
- familiarity with important interactive media applications in cinema, games, documentary, extended reality, immersive storytelling, and installation/environmental art
- a creative work employing production technologies and software in interactive cinema, video games, augmented reality, digital narrative, or another media platform
Required Readings and Supplementary Materials
Readings will be provided as PDFs, which can be accessed on our course website, ctcs478.com.
Course Notes
Please allocate $50 for expenses such as games and app purchases.
Description and Assessment of Assignments
Participation (5%): Active engagement with ideas, activities, and discussions is imperative for your success in the course. You should have read/watched/played the assigned texts before each class. You begin the course with full marks for participation; if you are disruptive in class (arrive late, leave early, use your phone, etc.), your participation mark will be reduced. Honor the work of your peers by engaging with their research and creations.
Interactive Practice Assignment (20%): You will make an interactive experience and share it with the class. There is much latitude here, and I will be introducing you to interactive authoring tools, exemplary works, and prototyping strategies to provide inspiration and direction. Examples of creative work made for this course include interactive narratives/films using Twine or Eko, videogames using free software like GameMaker, alternate reality games/websites, table-top games, augmented reality experiences, and many other sorts of projects.
Team Presentation (25%): Students will work in teams of 2 or 3 to design and deliver a 45- to 60-minute presentation on a week/topic of their choosing; team composition will be determined after the first meeting. The team presentation may be comprised of some combination of lecture, activity, performance, workshop, game—or other modality that encourages your peers to engage with ideas or practices connected to the week’s topic. The presentation should not focus solely on the assigned readings.
Critical Comments (20%): Over the course of the term, you will submit to the course website, ctcs478.com, five critical comments on the week’s required reading(s) (4% each = 20%); comments (300-500 words) should be posted by 5pm on the day before class (i.e., Mondays). The comments should present an analysis of arguments/ideas communicated in the week’s readings and, ideally, extrapolate from these ideas to consider related works, ideas, or experiences of critical interest. Comments will be evaluated in terms of their clarity and intellectual verve; we’ll likely reference your comments in class. Posts made on the week of your presentation do not count as one of your required five critical comments.
Final Project (25%): This can take one of two forms. Students may submit a paper (1800-2500 words) offering a critical argument and analysis on a subject related to interactive media; alternatively, students may submit a work of interactive media and a statement (300-500 words) describing the work and its theoretical significance. Interactive works may be cinematic, game-based, theatrical, literary, etc. Students should consult with the instructor before deciding on subjects for the essay or interactive work. Essays and creative works will be presented (in a skeletal/condensed form) as pecha kucha talks (5%) on the last day of class; pecha kucha slide decks and Works Cited should be posted to our website, ctcs478.com.
Grading Breakdown
| assignment | % of grade |
| critical comments/reflections | 20% (5 x 4%) |
| interactive practice | 20% |
| team presentation | 25% |
| final project | 25% |
| pecha kucha talk (incl. slides and Works Cited) | 5% |
| participation | 5% |
| TOTAL | 100% |
Grade Scale
| Grade | % |
| A | 86-100 |
| A- | 80-85 |
| B+ | 77-79 |
| B | 73-76 |
| B- | 70-72 |
| C+ | 67-69 |
| C | 63-66 |
| C- | 60-62 |
| D+ | 57-59 |
| D | 53-56 |
| D- | 50-52 |
| F | 49 and below |
A Note About Time
CTCS courses are conventionally four hours long to accommodate feature film screenings, which are customary in Cinema and Media Studies courses. Because CTCS 478 is focused on interactivity and has no in-class feature-length screenings, our course will normally run for three hours and include approximately 120 minutes of lecture/discussion/activity and 45-60 minutes of team presentation time. If we need to take the full four hours for a longer activity or lab visit, I will let you know in advance.
Content Notice
In this course, we will at times engage with difficult or disturbing subject matter related to race, gender, class, and other sites of oppression. I will do my best to provide content warnings, and I would ask that you also let us know if material you will be presenting contains potentially painful or stressful content. Please let me know if you are concerned about particular subjects or media works in our itinerary.
Assignment Submission Policy
Written assignments should be submitted on time and in electronic form either to the instructor or to the course website, as indicated by the assignment. Creative/practice projects should be submitted in a format that facilitates access and evaluation of the project. Critical comments should be posted to the relevant week on the course website, ctcs478.com. Papers and projects submitted after the due date will be penalized half a letter grade per day late to a maximum of four days, at which point the assignment will receive a zero. Critical reflections submitted late will not be graded.
Attendance (CAMS division policy)
In accordance with university recommendations, all meetings of this class (except the first week) will be held in person. Students who become ill and need to self-isolate will be supported in their efforts to stay current with classwork and assignments, to the extent possible. Please contact me at least one hour before class start time if you become ill and need to self-isolate. Do not come to class if you are experiencing any symptoms of COVID-19 or other illnesses. Requests for longer term exemptions must be supported by a written accommodation request from the USC Office of Student Accessibility Services (OSAS) https://osas.usc.edu.
Content Distribution and Synchronous Session Recordings (USC policy)
Recording a university class without the express permission of the instructor and announcement to the class is prohibited unless conducted pursuant to an Office of Student Accessibility Services (OSAS) accommodation. Recording can inhibit free discussion and thus infringe on the academic freedom of other students as well as the instructor. Distribution or use of notes, recordings, exams, or other intellectual property, based on university classes or lectures without the express permission of the instructor for purposes other than individual or group study is also prohibited (see Living our Unifying Values: The USC Student Handbook, page 13).
AI Generators
In this course, we are interested in the critical use of AI tools in creative and scholarly work. Thus, AI tools are permitted but only in the ideation, prototyping, and iterating phases of project development; you may use AI to write code. AI tools must be conscientiously and transparently deployed: they must be acknowledged. For any assignment for which you have used AI, include an addendum explaining the rationale and tactics for its employment. For example, indicate the prompts you used at a specific stage in your development process, or provide your instructor access to essay drafts or iterations so that they can clearly trace the development and authorship of your work. Using an AI tool to generate content without proper attribution will be treated as plagiarism and reported to the Office of Academic Integrity. Please see USC Libraries AI Generators Citation Guidance for further information about attribution.