Courses

When students think of narrative they most often go right to their favorite stories. Watching _Casablanca _on a snowy December eve, the sweeping mesas of the Mexican frontier as the gallop along on horseback in Red Dead Redemption, or maybe just The Office running endlessly on repeat on a cracked iPad next to their laptop as they hustle through a quiz before rushing off to class.

We often think of the shining or at least halcyon moments when we think narrative. But Narrative Design has grown into much more than just The Hero’s Journey. Narrative has reached well beyond just stories - its bled into perception, color, plot, persuasion and so much more. It’s being used (and quite effectively) to reshape how we as a society think because of our keen interest in organizing things as narrative. We’ve seen it used for all purposes, whether for the good of mankind or bad.

As stated above students will be looking at popular narrative design in media such as games, film, TV, advertising, podcasts, and journalism and then reverse engineering the elements used in order to construct them. Students will be breaking down these large sweeping narratives into smaller more manageable parts, and then using said parts to design their own narratives. This constructivist epistemological approach will help keep the students in a constant state of creation and analysis.

Questions about the course can be directed to swoper@iu.edu

This course is eligible for honors credit through Hutton Honors College.

Catalog Information: COLL-S 103  FRESHMAN SEMINAR IN A&H

Instructor:

Richard (Rush) Swope

Email:

swoper@iu.edu

Department:

The Media School

Rush Swope received his BFA in Drawing from the University of Louisville and his MFA in Interactive Design and Game Development from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He entered the game industry by working with Guerrilla Games on Killzone 2. He then moved on as an artist for PlayStation All- Stars Battle Royale, Telltales’ Tales from the Borderlands, & Game of Thrones series. With a strong belief that games can be art, he wrote an essay for the “Art of Video Games” exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute’s American Art Museum on ambiguity’s role in the game Limbo. He has also worked on the motion capture for the film Warcraft. Most recently he worked at Square Enix for the Cinematics of Outriders and currently owns a studio in Bloomington called The Raft Genre which is working on their debut title. 

GenEd Information: Approved for the Arts & Humanities requirement of the IU Bloomington General Education program.