I look forward to this course on Coursera focused on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings Online, exploring what happens to stories and films when they become online games. Jay Clayton of the Vanderbilt University will teach about narrative theory, media studies and video games (history and theory). Also included are some ‘landmarks of romance literature’.
The course starts on July 14 and runs till September 1.
Another course on Coursera which may interest those interested in video games is Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps. Teachers are Mick Grierson, Marco Gillies and Matthew Yee-King of the University of London. It seems to be a more technical course for those wanting to do creative work in video games, art installations or interactive music. The programming language used is Processing: an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. The project was initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, both formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab (Wikipedia).
You don’t have to be a programmer to start this course. The course started already, so hurry up!