U. of Iowa teaching video games journalism course

[Norrin Radd]

http://jimromenesko.com/2012/08/28/video-games-journalism-class-debuts-at-university-of-iowa/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Think maybe the whole "specialization" idea might be going a bit far here. But it is only one class, and I took History of Comic Book Art and History of the Beatles as an undergrad.

 

[Smallpotatoes]

Two decades ago in PCU Jeremy Piven was right. You can major in Gameboy if you know how to bull****.

 

[Stitch]

Is college worth going to unless it offers a few obscure or useless courses?

 

[Rhody31]

The most fun classes I took were Introduction to Refereeing and a Stanley Kubrick Film Class.

 

[Elliotte Friedman]

I'm actually a big believer that high schools should be doing essay courses on things like the history of video games. Best chance of getting people to write well is by getting them to write about things they're interested in.

 

[Versatile]

Journalism schools are not liberal arts schools, and the current standards for certified journalism schools restrict how many journalism classes a major can take for credit toward graduation. In other words, you're a journalism major and your choices for an upper-level skills course are investigative reporting or video-game reviewing. That's my problem with this setup.

The course is being added to the curriculum to wow prospective students, not to further education. Cultural criticism courses at any good journalism school should teach students how to review and cover video and computer games. There's no reason for this to be its own class.

Now, should anyone even bother majoring in journalism? That's another issue.