Last fall, Vanderbilt University offered a course on video games as a means of telling or adapting a story – specifically, adapting the works of J.R.R. Tolkien into the popular MMO, The Lord of the Rings Online.
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
The course will be offered again this summer, running from July 14 to September 1. It is free and open to the public, and is also eligible for a Verified Certificate Statement of Accomplishment, which can be displayed on LinkedIn and other sites.
You do not have to play The Lord of the Rings Online™ (LOTRO) to enroll in this class because we will have two tracks, one for those who are able to play LOTRO and the other for people who would like to learn about video games, Tolkien, and the romance tradition but choose not to play themselves.
If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can find more information – including a syllabus and recommended reading – and enroll via Coursera.
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