CTCS 505 Survey of Interactive Media
Spring 2024 / Units: 2.0
Tuesdays, 10:00 – 13:00. SCB 101
Course Website: ctcs505.com (password: ctcs505)
Instructor: Kiki Benzon (she/they)
Office Hours: by appointment
Contact Info: kbenzon@cinema.usc.edu
Course Assistant: Waris Sandhu (they/them)
Contact Info: wsandhu@usc.edu
Course Description
In this course, we will examine the history, aesthetics, and cultural implications of interactivity through media. Pursuing a spectrum of interactive modes and technologies—cinematic, literary, ludic, transmedial—we will consider the ways in which interactive media work to mobilize creativity and extend individual and collective agency. Our exploration will involve critical analyses of media artifacts including films, television shows, arts exhibitions, games, and virtual/immersive experiences; we will be particularly interested in the ways in which these artifacts simultaneously produce and are produced by the cultural contexts within which they are situated. We will also experience, play, and create interactive media works, and discuss practices in the field with industry, academic, and arts specialists.
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 in the contexts of critical 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 technology
- familiarity with important interactive media applications in cinema, games, documentary, mixed-media/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, ctcs505.com.
Course Notes
Please allocate $50 for expenses, which may include game purchases and admission to an escape room.
Description and Assessment of Assignments
The course will balance critical and experiential approaches to interactive media, and the evaluation methods aim to reflect this. While there are several “must-do,” graded activities with fairly rigid parameters, several assignments in the course offer flexibility for you to investigate particular forms, theories, and practices that you find most valuable or interesting. Sharing our curiosity, expertise, and research findings is paramount in the course.
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 works made for this assignment include: interactive narratives/films using Twine or Eko, alternate reality websites, table-top games, augmented reality experiences, a posthumanist-themed dance video, a multimedia magic performance—and many other sorts of projects. You’ll be asked to submit your creation to me (via link, video documentation, or other format) before class on October 29, when you’ll be invited to share/demo your work for the class (voluntary).
Team Presentation (25%): Students will work in groups of three to design and deliver a 45/60-minute presentation on a week/topic of their choosing; team membership 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, ctcs505.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 (2500-3000 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 Week 15 of our website, ctcs505.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 |
Assignment Submission Policy
Written assignments should be submitted on time and in electronic form (PDF); 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, ctcs505.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 receive a grade.
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 or our Course Assistant at least one hour prior to 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 will be considered on a case-by-case basis and must be supported by a written accommodation request from the USC Office of Student Accessibility Services (OSAS) https://osas.usc.edu.
A Note About Time
CTCS courses are conventionally 4 hours long in order to accommodate feature film screenings, which are customary in Cinema and Media Studies courses. Because this is a 2-credit course focused on interactivity (with no in-class feature-length screenings), our course will run for a maximum of three hours and include approximately 60-90 minutes of lecture/discussion and 45-60 minutes of team presentation time.
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.
Weekly Schedule
Week 1: August 27 – VIA ZOOM (link will be sent out)
introduction to the course
Week 2: September 3
critical theory & media studies
| prepare | Hansen, Mark. “New Media.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. W.T.J. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, eds. MIT, 2010.
Recommended: Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin, “Theory.” Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT, 2000. 2-62. Manovich, Lev. “What is New Media?” The Language of New Media. MIT, 2001. 18-55. Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly. (2014) Shaw, Adrienne. “Encoding and decoding affordances: Stuart Hall and interactive media technologies.” Media, Culture & Society. 39.4 (2017): 592–602. |
Week 3: September 10
agency & interactivity: videogames
| prepare | Muriel, Daniel and Garry Crawford. “Video games and agency within neoliberalism and participatory culture.” Video games as Culture: The Role and Importance of Video Games in Contemporary Society. Routledge, 2018.
Play or watch play-through The Stanley Parable (2011) and a “sandbox” / open world game (e.g. Grand Theft Auto V, Fallout 4, Skyrim, No Man’s Sky, etc.) Recommended: Tanenbaum, Karen and Joshua Tanenbaum. “Commitment to Meaning: A Reframing of Agency in Games.” Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. et al. “Agency Reconsidered.” Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Proceedings of DiGRA, 2009. |
Week 4: September 17
designing for agency & creativity
| prepare | Keogh, Brendan. “Situating the videogame maker’s agency through craft.” Convergence. 28.2 (2022): 374–388.
Recommended: Cole, Tom and Marco Gillies. “Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games.” Games and Culture. 16.1 (2021): 87–207. Motte, Warren. “Constraint on the Move.” Poetics Today. 30.4 (2009): 719–735. |
| activity | The Film From the Future |
Week 5: September 24
discourses in videogames I
| prepare | Consalvo, Mia. “There Is No Magic Circle.” Games and Culture. 4.4 (Oct. 2009): 408–17.
Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. MIT Press, 2009: 1-10. (excerpt) Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds. MIT Press, 2006. Recommended: Ryan, Mary Laure. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies. 1 (2009): 43-59. |
| team presentation 1 |
|
Week 6: October 1
discourses in videogames II
| prepare | Malkowski, Jennifer and TreaAndrea M. Russworm. “Introduction: Identity, Representation, and Video Games Studies: Beyond the Politics of the Image. Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games. Indiana UP: (2017): 1-19.
Recommended: Mukherjee, Souvik. “The playing fields of empire: empire and spatiality in video games.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. 7.3 (2015): 299-315. Harvey, Alison. “Twine’s Revolution: Democratization, Depoliticization, and the Queering of Game Design.” Game: The Journal of Italian Game Studies. (2014): 95-107. Shaw, Adrienne. “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity.” New Media & Society. 14.1 (2012): 28–44. |
| team presentation 2 |
|
Week 7: October 8
no class – fall recess
Week 8: October 15
interactive film and television / database cinema
| prepare | “Bandersnatch” (Black Mirror S4E1, 2019)
McSweeney, Terrence and Stuart Joy. “Change Your Past, Your Present, Your Future? Interactive Narratives and Trauma in Bandersnatch.” Through the Black Mirror Deconstructing the Side Effects of the Digital Age. Palgrave, 2018. Allison, Tanine. “Losing control: Until Dawn as Interactive Movie.” New Review of Film and Television Studies. 18.3 (2020). Recommended: Possibilia (Daniels, 2014) https://helloeko.com/v/D3iXb9 Conley, Donovan & Benjamin Burroughs. “Bandersnatched: Infrastructure and Acquiescence in Black Mirror.” Critical Studies in Media Communication. 37.2 (2020): 20-132. Lunenfeld, Peter. “The Myth of Interactive Cinema.” Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. (Nebraska, 2004): 377-390. Manovich, Lev. “Database as a Symbolic Form.” Millennium Film Journal. 43 (1999). |
| team presentation 3 |
|
Week 9: October 22
interactive art: installation & immersion
| prepare | Stiles, Kristine and Edward A. Shanken. “Missing in Action: Agency and Meaning in Interactive Art.” Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Margot Lovejoy, et al. eds. Intellect Books, 2014. 31-54.
Recommended: Krueger, Myron. “Responsive Environments.” Proceedings of the national computer conference. (AFIPS Press, 1977); The New Media Reader. (MIT, 2003). Kwastek, Katia. “Interactive Art—Definitions and Origins.” Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. (MIT, 2013): 1-39. |
| team presentation 4 |
|
Week 10: October 29
interactive practice projects
| deliverable / activity | interactive practice project due (20%) – email to kbenzon@cinema.usc.edu before 10:00 PST / share project in class (voluntary) |
Week 11: November 5
environmental interactions: theme parks, interactive theatre, escape rooms
| prepare | Westworld (2015 – ) (episode 01) HBO (content warming: se*ual violence)
Ivănescu, Andra. “Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play.” Reading Westworld. Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay, eds. Palgrave, 2019. Recommended: Freitag, Florian. “Critical Theme Parks: Dismaland, Disney and the Politics of Theming.” Continuum. 31.6 (2017): 923–32. Nakevska, Marija. et al. “Interactive storytelling in a mixed reality environment: The effects of interactivity on user experiences.” Entertainment Computing. 21 (2017): 97–104. |
| team presentation 5 |
|
escape room field trip – evening TBA
Week 12: November 12
transmedia I: cross-platform storytelling and worldbuilding
| prepare
|
Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence.’” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 1-24,
Recommended: Baker, David and Elena Schak. “The Hunger Games: transmedia, gender and possibility.” Continuum. 33.2 (2019): 201-215. Freeman, Matthew. “India: augmented reality, transmedia reality and Priya’s Shakti.” Global Convergence Cultures. Matthew Freeman and William Proctor, eds. Routledge, 2018. |
| team presentation 6 |
|
Week 13: November 19
transmedia II: participatory cultures and social media
| prepare | Fuchs, Christopher. “Social Media as Participatory Culture.” Social Media: A Critical Introduction. (Sage Press, 2014): 53-67.
Rendell, James. “Black (Anti)fandom’s Intersectional Politicization of The Walking Dead as a Transmedia Franchise.” Abigail De Kosnik and andré Carrington, eds. Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color. special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures. 29 (2019). Recommended: Pearce, Celia. “Communities of Play: The Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds.” Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, eds. (MIT Press, 2006): 31-39. |
| team presentation 7 |
|
Week 14: November 26
TBA
Week 15: December 3
pecha kucha presentations
| Via Zoom | pecha kucha presentations (5%) |
| deliverable | post to Week 15 of our website the slide deck and a Works Cited list of your pecha kucha presentation |
Exam Week
| deliverable | research paper or project due (25%) |
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