This Monday, I got the marks for the Non-Fiction Theory and Analysis paper that cost me my christmas break. Since I wrote the paper in 4 days and had a terrible shortage of materials for it, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get more than 7 for it, but I guess my invigilator was in a really good mood or something because I got a 10 (for all you non-Danes, the scale goes -3, 0, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12). That qualifies it for being put up here, so… you may download it via this link:
My Non-Fiction Theory and Analysis paper: Not Just Entertainment 
As with The Simulated Story, this paper is in Danish, so has a very limited audience. I’m sorry I never got around to translating my other paper, but this one will definitely not be translated. I feel it’s significantly inferior to The Simulated Story. If it was graded the same, it’s probably because this one was handled by people who have no real competence within game studies. I had to really stretch the subject of the class to write about my chosen medium – games – and this time I chose to submit the paper to the teacher who actually taught the class, rather than somebody with knowledge specific to games. I guess these guys were more easily impressed by my gaming voodoo.
I gotta admit I found the paper quite a challenge. The class calls for analysis of documentary films, TV, or various forms of journalism or advertisement. It wasn’t difficult to come up with a way to stretch that over in the direction of games – serious games fit the bill pretty well, and a very good specimen, Global Conflicts: Palestine, was released last year by a Danish studio – but there’s very close to no academia written on the subject. And the material I did manage to dig up is mostly social sciences or economics oriented (how can we use games to sell our product?). I was lucky enough to have a Ph.D. dissertation written by the producer and game designer of Palestine, but in the end I had to grab some articles about documentary films and attempt to apply it on the game. The paper sort of automatically ended up being about whether or not this is a viable method.
I’ll spoil it for you. The conclusion is: Maybe.
OMG, so much text in it… and all Danish
I’ll have a go at it when I could sleep the night before
You may want to just give it a miss EER, it’s not that brilliant a read. I checked the exam board yesterday and it seems half the class got 10 or 12, so it seems they were extremely generous with their marks. I’d probably have given it a 7 myself.
Luckily I already knew what the game was about so I could skip the first half of the paper
I may or may not complete reading it. We’ll see.