Sometimes you can see yourself through the mirror of time
"...My term on the JET Programme will be finished by July of 2006, at which time I'll have to move on to something else. Of course, I have been thinking a lot about Graduate School, but I find my academic passions meandering about in a VERY obscure field (as usual, I suppose).
I want to study narrative in video games using a comparative studies angle, sort of like trying to study the "literature" of video games with maybe Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces as a framework to go by. I find that as media technologies become more and more advanced at ever-increasing rates, entire libraries of well-written, well-though-out narratives are being passed over as merely "the plots of video games." The constant advent of new technologies is allowing video game developers to tell more complex and theme-driven stories now more than ever (well, at least more than in the days of Pac-man--no denounment to be had there...). Although, I haven't the slightest clue as to what field that is exactly. My research online has yielded one very close match--the Comparative Media Studies curriculum at MIT. This course of study offers a two year program culminating in a Master of Sciences degree. That's not really the degree I want in the end, but out of all my searchings thus far, the old boys at MIT seem to have the only well-fleshed out program for anything like what I want to attempt to study.
Well, I guess my question is, just off the top of your head, what college of University would you recommend for that kind of a study? Subsequently, if you think of any problems with my proposed area of study, please let me know so I can start rephrasing myself in a way that doesn't make me sound like a video game geek trying to get a degree by playing video games all day (which of course, I'm not).
I suppose I'm trying to find a University that would foster this inquiry as opposed to laugh at it from behind a copy of Homer's Odyssey, you know?"
Yes, I do know.
You're going to be just fine, Chris.
