This paper is about your ideas now on videogames. You’ve played five, and heard several arguments about them, both critical and supporting. Now you are asked to produce your own original conclusion about games, and to support this conclusion with arguments from the games you’ve played and the essays you’ve read.
Skills/Knowledge
After completing this assignment, you should be able to:
Generate an effective thesis, and a support structure to reinforce it.
Summarize, respond to, and evaluate a writer’s argument.
Cite other writers’ ideas to support your own.
Embed ethical claims effectively.
Document sources correctly.
Write in a formal academic style with few or no errors in grammar & punctuation.
Interpret videogames for meaning and experience.
Design the final written research paper well
Task
For this assignment, you’ll need to 1) “read” the videogames Among the Sleep. Then after you finish, watch the video essay “How Small Open-World Games feel Big” by Razbuten. When you’re finished with both of those, your writing assignment is to present an argument that explores the idea of open world games. You will need to cite several sources in this essay!
Remember, this is not a paper on Among the Sleep!
It is a research paper about videogames.
As a help, you can see that both essays touch upon the issue of how videogames make their worlds feel big or small, and how that comes sometimes unexpectedly from smaller-budget game studios. To help you start, you might think about whether
Videogame worlds are more appealing than reality
or whether
Big budget games are better games for new players to start playing first
You can choose another topic, but try to stay close to these ideas. Present your own conclusions, citing sources, with strong structure, and carefully revised.
Don’t forget: you are strongly encouraged to use the earlier videogames and video essays, as well, for claims!
Make sure that your argument does the following:
You argue your own original conclusion (=thesis)
You summarize and respond and evaluate several sources
You touch upon the core experience of the videogame
You use the videogame to support your own thesis (that is, using examples from gameplay as claims to support your points)
You demonstrate your ability to cite sources
You demonstrate your ability embed quotations correctly using tags, citations, and explanations
You include a good image with a caption.
Formatting and other requirements:
Use 1” margins, 11 or 12 pt. Times New Roman font
Lines spaced at 1.5, with extra space between new paragraphs
Indent the first line of each new paragraph
Full justify the text
Be sure to have your name, which assignment this is, and a title (centered) at the top
The expectation for this essay is 1200 words. Use more if you need: use fewer at your own risk. It should be approximately eight paragrahs
MLA or Turabian documentation, including in-text citations
Papers which do not meet these requirements will lose points
Papers which do not follow the font size, spacing, or other formatting requirements will be
reformatted to check for attempts to change the length
Criteria for success
A good structure (thesis – points – claims)
A good response (TSIS, summary/response)
Good documentation (embedded quotations, citations, documentation pages)
Relatively error-free
Good use of several course texts (not just the most recent)
Your own ideas
A well-designed paper with images, good fonts, etc.
A formal style and organization of writing (introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, formal language, and so on)
I would also like you to talk about these games in the essay; Gris, Journey, Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, Among the sleep.