Two parts.

Part 1. (25 points)

I will assign each of you an academic article, based on the game you chose to focus on in your Close Reading 2. Write a 500-word response to this article, demonstrating your abilty to engage intellectually with the ideas found on Koster, Laurel, and/or Juul. Format your exercise according to MLA Style, including a complete and accurate MLA Works Cited page.

Part 2. (15 points)

Choose a recent game (you are welcome to choose the one you used in Part 1), and collect 10 good online sources. As you did in a previous assignment, create links to all 10 of your selected sites, and write informative blurbs for the first four sources. While you needn't go overboard, think of each "blurb" as a miniature new games journalism assignment. Instead of simply listing a dry catalog of what's on the other side of the link, draw on your subjective reactions to the website.

Submit your work by posting it to your weblog, and generate a Trackback (by clicking MT Quickpost) or post the URL in a comment.

Note on your online bibliography:

Each of the 10 items on your list should have an informative, useful title. "Source 1" is not an informative title, and "http://www.domain.com/archive/articles/2005/filename.html" is nowhere near as useful as Name of The File Goes Here.

Examples:

1. Wikipedia's Centipede (video game) I had no idea the PC in Centipede is a garden gnome. I always assumed I was playing an insect of some sort, squirting out venom to fight off attackers. A good basic introduction to Atari's garden-variety shooter, which first started feeding on quarters in 1980. Beware the spider!

2. Killer List of Video Games: Coin-Op Museum: Centipede
   When coin-operated arcade games are stacked shoulder-to-shoulder, you can't get a full view of the artwork along the sides. This site gives you full views of the cabinet design, as well as close-ups of game screens and the sparse but elegant instructions card. The control panel featured not a joystick, but a trackball.

3. Retrogaming Times offers "The Many Faces of... Centipede" (scroll down to the middle of the page) which compares numerous different classic home versions of the game, on systems ranging from the Apple II to the TI 99/4a.

4. In "Everything Old is New Again: Remaking Computer Games," Richard Rouse III compares his role as lead designer in a remake of Centipede to the task of having to remake the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho: "[T]his classic recreation will never exactly replicate the original Centipede. As a result, I think, this replica has a deleterious effect on the entire enterprise."

5. I came across several scattered references to co-designer Donna Bailey as the first female game designer, but so far haven't found more than a paragraph on her at a time. Her Wikipedia article, under the spelling "Dona Bailey," remains a stub.

6. Centipede screen captures from Retrogames.com.

7. MobyGames has collected quaint advertising copy for Centipede.

8. The Great Games Database entry for Centipede offers very technical information for serious retrogaming hardware collectors.

9. Few online versions of classic arcade games are faithful to the originals, so playing them is like reading Cliffs Notes. Still, here's a Shockwave version of Centipede. This Flash version doesn't come close to emulating the whimsy and delicacy of the original.

10. The novelty album Pac-Man Fever includes "Ode to a Centipede." The musicians' official website is buggy, but you can hear snippets of the songs for free, via the page where you can sample ringtones.