Course: Playful Pasts & Futures  credits: 5

Content
Playful Pasts and Futures is a course that historicises games and confronts students with the questions like “Why do we study games?”. Students will learn how play is a form of learning and how we use games to explore the possibilities of new technology. The course touches on the history of the internet, technology and games and the ethics connected to it. 
 
Essential to understanding interactive systems and their possibilities is to be able to see the elements of which a system consists and how they relate to the experience the system intends to deliver. For budding new technologies these elements might be clear, but the experiences they could deliver are still being explored. A fundamental part of exploring these experiences is to find goals and interactions for new technology that stimulates familiarization and sparks engaging interaction. 
 
By being able to assess and identify the core tenets of interactive systems, the student is challenged to reassess their own relation to the interactive systems they know. In turn, this understanding opens the student up for identifying new interactions or applying old interactions in novel ways; and enables the student to assess the current interactive digital media industries and identify new opportunities to act on. The course is assessed by a poster presentation and a written report.