GBL 185 PREPARATORY SEMINAR FOR RENAISSANCE ITALY: VIDEO GAMES VERSUS REALITY
The pre-departure course will provide students the chance to play through and analyze in groups the Assassin’s Creed II video game. The game takes approximately 19 hours to beat, so, groups of students will be assigned roughly 1 to 1.5 hours of game play each week. PlayStation 4 Consoles and copies of the game will be on reserve through Media Services and in Belk Library, respectively. This exploration will give students the chance to preview Renaissance Italian cities, personalities, and works of art in an in-depth, immersive digital environment.
Then, we will read each week secondary scholarly sources regarding the places, time periods, and structures represented in the game. We can arrive at a complete understanding of the game itself and enough initial information about the Italian elements to make the course component in Italy fully focused on studying the actual artifacts (with occasional returns to video footage from key moments in the game). Then, in Italy, we will shift our reading focus from secondary sources about the Renaissance to primary sources from the Renaissance.
Finally, each class session will conclude with the practice of basic, useful Italian phrases.
Prerequisite
Acceptance into GBL 285
Course Types
Civilization
Course Outcomes