Teaching Violence and Video Games with Joystick Warriors

Abstract

This set of lesson plans shows how the Media Education Foundation film Joystick Warriors can be utilized by instructors in an Intro to Media Studies Course. By building on earlier course conversations on media effects, overdetermination, representation, political economy, and violence, these lesson plans provide a conceptual framework and a series of activities to help utilize Joystick Warriors in a critical-cultural Media Studies curriculum. By pairing Joystick Warriors with a series of lectures and readings on the relationship between violence and video games, this set of lesson plans can help teachers encourage students to have complex, critical conversations about video games role' in sustaining cultures of violence, militarism, and hegemonic masculinity.