In a classroom in the University of Virginia’s Clark Hall, a coterie of mad scientists delves into the grisly mythos of the undead to make their own creatures of the night, their own vampires.
It’s dark work. Even the course description carries a warning: “This is a course on VAMPIRES. We will be discussing blood, corpses, death, murder and all the things that make the human race interesting and terrifying! If you are concerned the content may disturb you, it probably will!”
This horror show is Bits & Bytes: Exploring Vampires in Video Games, also known as SLAV 2500. Computer science professor Mark Sherriff and Stanley J. Stepanic, an associate professor of Slavic studies, co-teach the course that merges superstition and literature with the culture of computer gaming.
We’re a smaller department and it’s always good to collaborate.
The class was spawned a year or so ago in a Reddit post when a student mentioned Stepanic’s popular SLAV 2360 course, called Dracula, which takes a deep dive into the what and why of vampirism.
“I’m often on Reddit and I saw a student posted on a standard thread about bucket list classes for UVA and, of course, Stanley’s Dracula course was on the list,” said Sherriff, who teaches game programming and design, among other computer science courses. “Me, being somewhat snarky, posted that I should set a goal for myself to teach a class that someone would put on this list because a course named ‘Software Engineering’ doesn’t exactly sound that exciting.”
Stepanic, who also lurks in Reddit’s dark alleys, saw the post.
“Let’s make a vampire video game class,” he replied to Sherriff, and the game was on.
Dracula, Noseferatu and their ilk have lead roles in literature, movies and video games. Students in UVA’s Bits and Bytes course used vampiric lore when creating their own computer games. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
“That was the end of last spring semester, about a year ago,” Stepanic said. “We just started to shoot the breeze, basically, about how this would and could work. I had been thinking of doing a cross-departmental course of some kind. We’re a smaller department and it’s always good to collaborate.”
Vampires, of course, can be centuries old. In the video game world, they harken back to the dawn of time – 1979 – with Dracula Hunter, a limited-release Japanese arcade game. The player was set in a haunted mansion armed with a cross to face a cloud of aimlessly roaming vampires, while protecting a sleeping princess and clueless villagers passing through. If the player was skilled enough they could kill every vampire on screen by aiming their cross for the open door of Dracula’s mansion.
Sounds like a pain in the neck, but not for gamers like Sherriff and Stepanic.
Stepanic took his extensive knowledge of vampiric folklore and affection for games and devised some new teaching methods and materials. Sherriff researched ways to make creating a video game easier for non-computer science students.
“Once we figured out how we could do it, we just started to build it over the summer and get ideas together,” Stepanic said.
So far, it’s worked. The course was set up for 100 students, but expanded to 150 due to demand.
“I honestly took the class because I had Dracula with professor Stepanic last semester, and I really liked his class and how he teaches,” fourth-year student Nadia Varga said. “The professors are entertaining and engaging. It’s like an extension of Dracula combined with an intro game-design class.”
