Video Game Journalism Class Premieres At The University of Iowa

That reminds me, I need to buy more glitter and deduct it as a business expense.

IGN and The University of Iowa have partnered to offer a video game journalism class called “Specialized Reporting & Writing: Video Games & Communication” which started its first semester last week. Instructor and PhD candidate Kyle Moody shared his class syllabus with Jim Romenesko, so now we can see what his twenty students have to look forward to and/or eventually regret undertaking.

The syllabus describes the class as focusing on “how video games function as communication of narratives, social ideas, cultural norms, and gendered, racial, and sexual dimensions.” Moody also emphasized that the class is not “your personal recess period.” Students will have to write a 1,000 to 1,500-word review or feature (or do a video presentation) and keep a “play log” to discuss any games they’re playing. The required reading includes All Your Base Are Belong To Us by Harold Goldberg and Extra Lives by Tom Bissell as well as several articles, including Roger Ebert’s insistence that video games can never be art.

A more in-depth summary of the syllabus is available at Jim Romenesko‘s site. If you didn’t get to be one of the twenty students studying video game journalism University of Iowa class, don’t fret. You can save yourself some time by reading our 39 Headlines You Need to Become a Successful Video Game Blogger. And remember, your lucrative new job doing video game freelance writing from home will bring a tremendous freedom. And you know what accompanies that freedom?

Ah, blogging.

[Pictures via Gawker and Pleated-Jeans.]

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