MDST 3559

Sean is the worst professor I've ever had. I took his Superhero Media course expecting it to be an enjoyable class and it ended up being my most difficult class of the semester. To start, Sean is the hardest grader. His expectations are unrealistically high and he is annoyingly stubborn and condescending. He has very strict office hours and if you can't attend because of another class conflict will not be accommodating at all because he has "no time in his schedule." The class consists of 6 two pages papers where you have to meet satisfactory on 3/6 in order to get credit. Seems simple but was actually very complicated because he would give unsatisfactories over the smallest things. Then you have a background research paper that's 4-6 pages and a final reflection that's 8 pages plus a final group project in which you have to create your own marvel adaptation. And to be even more annoying he wants papers to be written in 1.5 spacing instead of double spaced. There are also about 2-3 20+ page readings assigned every week. At the end of the semester, he asked for feedback about the course to determine if he should teach it again but instead of taking in feedback he would just tell students that their feedback is wrong. Don't take this class. It was awful. #tCFfall2021

Sean Duncan is amazing. He's personable, friendly, and extremely passionate about gaming and all things related to gaming. Interactive Storytelling was more about how to build narrative and how to create a game focused around interactive fiction (IF), but it was a very interesting Media Studies course. At the beginning of the semester, we started out with a lot of boring readings about narrative and the history of gaming... but Sean quickly realized that was NOT what we were interested in and took it upon himself to change the focus of the course. Throughout the semester, you will have to complete 3 out of 6 Play/Design Tasks, which are really simple and easy assignments based around the content of the class. The catch is that you either get a 100 or you get a 0. I found it easy to get 100s on all of the tasks I did, but only because I carefully checked the instructions each time and did not leave a SINGLE thing out. A lot of classmates did get 0s, but he does give out regrade opportunities. His grading is not that harsh honestly, for other regular papers I thought I was graded on pretty easily and I ended up with an A+. One big thing in this class is participation - since there are no quizzes or exams, you need to speak up a lot and actually contribute to the conversation if you want to stand out in the class. At the end of the semester, you write about your own participation and he either agrees with you and gives you a good grade, or he disagrees. Participation includes talking in the Slack, helping friends, asking questions, and making good points during discussions. The two projects that were my highlight of the class were Pecha Kucha Talks and making your own game for the final. For the Pecha Kucha, Sean assigns you to a random IF game and you have to play through it and give a presentation. This was really interesting for me, as I got an amazing game and it helped me come up with ideas for my actual game. For the final game, the two big options are Twine and Inform. If you have no experience whatsoever, that's fine because you get a lot of hands-on opportunities and lessons about these two platforms. Of course, you can use whatever platform you want, even if it isn't one of those two. In the end, though, taking this class was one of the best choices I've ever made because it was extremely fun and a great intersection between Computer Science and Media Studies (coincidentally, my two majors!).