Concept Courses

Last fall, Bill Turkel had a great blog entry calling for “concept projects” in academic history: like concept car prototypes or catwalk fashions, these would be imaginative efforts that need not prove wholly workable or utilitarian, but that might serve to get ideas into circulation, push the boundaries of the form, or, a la Thoreau, simply “affect the quality of the day.” A similar staple of my old Boston gaming / blogging circle was the Game I’d Like To Run post: basically these were trailers or elevator pitches for mental movies, never-to-be-written novels, and genre mashups that we had no real intention of constructing, but were fun to imagine and share.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about a handful of “concept courses,” probably because the school year just ended and so right now I’m about as far from facing a real classroom as the calendar lets me get. My next couple of posts, then, will be ideas for university classes that are interesting (to me at least) to think about and with. How they’d really work in practice, how they’d get approved by an education policy committee, whether I’d be qualified to teach them, are all of less importance than the notions themselves, the fragile but lovely potential of shiny soap-bubble ideas.

Here’s the first:

The Great Game: Simulation, Gaming, and History

In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations … saw that the vast map was useless, and … delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winter. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.
–Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

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[Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome here or there.]