By Katherine D. Harris
After debating good and evil, ripping apart the pages of The Hours, tweeting as a character, unfolding the sad pages of Nox, and poking fingers through the holes in Tree of Codes, my students arrived at the moment that I had been promising all semester: play. Using Callois' “typology of play,” we crafted our heroes and began playing Diablo III, an MMORPG created by Blizzard Entertainment and released in May 2012. “By Friday, you should have killed the Skeleton King.” That was their final assignment – along with analyzing their game play in various blog posts. By the conclusion of the semester, students had created engaging projects around this game play. Some chose to compare a Diablo III hero's free will to our other anti-heroes, A Clockwork Orange or Frankenstein, while others took a more creative perspective with a scrapbook and a collaborative video:
Alyssa Hernandez, “Terror & Horror in Frankenstein & Diablo III”
Krista Reutter, “Targeting an Audience: Diablo III”
Nahida Nisa, “A Question of Continuity: Examining the Suggestions of Nox and The Hours”
Nathan Hall, “The Visual Possibilities of Modern Literature”
Angela Martin and Savauna Reyna, “Can Textual Heroines Achieve a Modern Epic Win?”
These English majors ranged from discussing what is considered canonical literary figures (Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens) and up into the latest forms of entertainment and media. All in all, a successful semester of “screwing around.”