Topics covered may include:
-Gaming history, genres, and concepts
-Experiential, affective, and interpersonal vocabulary of gaming (e.g. saving, lives, crafting, leveling up, grinding, bosses, speedrunning, lore, NPCs, & gaming-centered forms of anxiety, acquisitiveness, fear, and curiosity)
-Social aspects of gaming (communities, relations, performances and self-performances, wikis and walkthroughs, modding, franchises)
-Ontology (what objects, beings, and types of action populate the game?), phenomenology (what kinds of embodiment, movement, and sensory processing and feedback does it make possible?), and epistemology (how is knowledge produced, withheld, awarded, used)
-“Poetics of space” (what sensations, experiences, actions are possible within which locations)? Types of spatial experience and organization (dungeons, “secret areas,” levels)
-Gameplay and game praxis (movement systems, physics, point of view, controls, puzzle-solving, combat systems, structures of reward)
-Gaming as present and future of the humanities