[MUSIC] Hi. I'm Jay Clayton and this is Charybol. He's an avatar of Jay Clayton. [MUSIC] And these are more avatars that have been a big part of my life over the last few years. [MUSIC] Charybol and I would like to welcome you to online games, literature, new media and narrative. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be exploring the cultural context of video games. This course is designed to introduce you to some useful tools for thinking about games. We will explore some fundamental concepts in narrative theory, learn a bit about media studies, and look into the history and theory behind online games. Along the way, we'll read some great works of literature, like Tolkien's Fellowship of the RIng, and poems by classic English writers such as Edmond Spencer, John Keats, Tederson, and Browning. What these authors share is an investment in the ancient tradition of the quest romance. And this shared legacy is the key to why Tolkien has inspired so many readers and given birth to an entire genre of fantasy literature. Not to mention an immensely popular mode of online games. This mode is the massively multi-player, online role-playing game, sometimes called an MMORPG or MMO for short. We're going to use Lord of the Ring Online, Turbine's popular MMO, as our main example. Lord of the Rings Online has an enormous advantage over other games on the market. It is based on a great novel which was made into a great movie before becoming a great MMO. Using Lord of the Rings enables us to demonstrate the value of what might be called multi-modal analysis, the comparison of a narrative across a number of different media. In this case, the three media of book, movie, and video game. There are lots of other games that we could have chosen, the most obvious candidate is World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is the most popular online game in the world today, and there are other cool MMOs that have large followings. They include Guild Wars, Star Wars, the Old Republic, Age of Conan, Eve Online, or an older MMO, Dark Age of Camelot, which still maintains a loyal following. But Lord of the Rings Online is perfect for our course. The game's free to play and I hope you'll join me by downloading the game and creating your own character. Those of you who are interested in pursuing the distinction track will need to play the game, and this requires access to a computer to download the game and an internet connection fast enough to play it. Those who choose not to play will still be able to understand the lectures and participate in the course. The videos for this class will be a little different from some other Coursera classes. We're going to mix things up with three kinds of videos. There'll be lectures, like the one you're watching now, and there'll be in game session like this one. [MUSIC] The third format will be classroom seminars with some students here at Vanderbilt. These seminars take place at The Curb Center, which I direct. The Curb Center is a national policy center devoted to fostering arts and creativity, both on campus and around the country. I think many of you will enjoy seeing how we run a literature seminar at Vanderbilt. And i hope some of you will appreciate watching students of varied experience with gaming encounter Lord of the Rings Online. None of them had played LOTRO before, and a couple of them were completely new to the world of gaming. We'll check in on the classroom now. Let me introduce you to the students in class. Deann. >> Hi my name is Deanne and I am interested in how adaptations like, the Lord of the Rings online game, influence both literature and the reader's experience of literature. >> Hi my name is Don and I've been a life long gamer. So one of the reasons I am in this class is to gain a critical vocabulary for one of my life long passions. >> Hi, my name is Blaine, and most of my experience with gaming comes from examining how adolescents learn from them in and outside of school. I'm not a gamer myself, but I'm really looking forward to delving into LOTRO as a gamer. >> Hello, my name's Kelly, and when I was very young, I thought there could be nothing better than a video game that captured the Lord of the Rings world. I failed in trying to do that myself, but I'm here to figure out what's gone in to doing it. >> My name is Chelsea. I'm a relatively new gamer, Minecraft obsessive, and I'm really interested in fandom and sci-fi and fantasy literature. This class is based on a first year writing seminar I co-taught with Matt Hall for three years at Vanderbilt. The first one I ever taught was Myst, the mysterious adventure game that was one of the first games to aspire to the status of art. It had something like 2500 images and 66 minutes of video. In the years to come, I played a variety of video games. When Lord of the Rings Online came along, I jumped at the chance to play my own character in Middle Earth. I've maxed out a couple of characters in LOTRO. Charybol is my tank, and Quilt is a healer, and I've got six, seven other characters at various levels, but I've never been truly hardcore gamer. I'm the leader of a kinship called Vicarious Universe but most of us enjoy the social dimension of the game as much as raiding and we prefer to explore the rich, narrative world to engaging in player versus player combat in the limited PVP area in LOTRO. That means that there may be hundreds of people taking this course who are more experienced gamers than I am, and there are people with years of game design experience enrolled as well. I encourage all of you to bring your many and varied skills to the class and to participate actively in the forums. I welcome your assistance in teaching others to understand and love the world of online games. In parting, let me say, I can't wait to share this exciting journey with you all.
