Procedural literacy: educating the new media practitioner
Michael Mateas · 2008
For humanities scholars, artists and designers, computer programming can seem a narrow technical skill, one that has no bearing on the theoretical and aesthetic concerns of new media. New media scholars and practitioners, including game designers and game studies scholars, may assume that the “mere ” technical details of code can be safely bracketed out of the consideration of the artifact. Contrary to this view, I argue that procedural literacy, of which programming is a part, is critically important for new media scholars and practitioners, that its opposite, procedurally illiteracy, leaves one fundamentally unable to grapple with the essence of computational media. This paper looks at one of the earliest historical calls for universal procedural literacy, explores how games can serve as an ideal object around which to organize a procedural literacy curriculum, and describes a graduate course developed at Georgia Tech, Computation as an Expressive Medium, designed to be a first course in procedural literacy for new media practitioners.