French Studies 397V - ST-Intro/French Video Games

Course taught in French. France and Canada are key producers of video games whose content can be played in French, even if their titles are systematically in English. This class is open to all students with the appropriate level of French (those who do not play video games already and those who play them regularly), and will examine the Francophone cultural components of the "gameplay", and what makes the narrative of video games a form of new media functioning between the language of comic books and that of movies, by working with games including The Adventures of Tintin, Valiant Hearts: The Great War, Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy, and Syberia 3 (all available on iPad, iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices). Based on these games, this class will also address the topic of the figure of the hero, as it is culturally marked, and interrogate the epic character of heroism and the transmission of such values.

Prerequisites: 4 semesters of French (Fr. 110, 120, 230, 240) or 4 years of high-school French