it will be 4 pages total (conference proposal and three sources)
The sources must be academic and from scholarly sources (not magazines, like Time or the New Yorker, blogs, or news sits (like CNN, etc.)

Annotated Bibliography

Background: Writing a paper while also doing research, at the same time, can sometimes hinder your ability to think critically and to write successfully. Annotated bibliographies are a way to organize research and build on a research question before having to very clearly organize information or construct your own argument.

Directions: This annotated bibliography, which will be five pages, will help you prepare for your research paper. An annotated bibliography is essentially a Works Cited page that, below citations, contains your summary and analysis of the articles you are using. THE ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY WILL NOT BE INCLUDED IN YOUR RESEARCH PAPER; IT WILL BE SUBMITTED SEPARATELY, MANY WEEKS BEFORE THE PAPER.

This bibliography should have two components:

• the first page will be a conference proposal stating the topic and focus of your research paper, suggesting the main questions you will be addressing and the importance of your research. This will be a final version of the conference proposal you turned in earlier in the semester.
• the remaining four pages will each be an annotated entry on a scholarly article related to your research question. Each entry will be about a page long, will summarize the article’s main arguments and paraphrase/quote a few important moments in the article. You will also have a few sentences at the end of each entry explaining the relevance of the article to your research paper.

Sample Entry On Next Page: Annotated bibliography entries are formatted like this (remember, MLA works cited entries should use a hanging indent; the paragraph summary/analysis of the article should use normal paragraph indentation):

Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen, The MIT Press, 2008, pp. 117-139.

In “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” Bogost argues that video games offer a form of rhetoric that has not yet been theorized in scholarship. He labels this type of rhetoric “procedural rhetoric,” which he defines as “the practice of authoring arguments through processes” (125). Utilizing a number of video games as examples, from Animal Crossing to America’s Army, Bogost discusses the many ways that games can be used rhetorically. Games, he says, can make intentional or unintentional arguments about systems and the ways ideologies function. For instance, he begins the article by arguing that Animal Crossing can be construed as a debt simulator, “creating a model of commerce and debt in  which the player can experience can experience and discover” (119) the consequences of consumer capitalism. An important aspect of his argument is that, while some games function explicitly as models of political, economic, and social systems, we could potentially analyze any game in light of a concept of “procedural rhetoric.” To rove this point he analyzes Bully, explaining how, beyond moralistic complaints about the game’s violence, we can understand how the game functions as an analytical model of school violence. While Bogost lays out his ideas clearly and uses useful examples, some of his examples, such as Take Bake Illinois (a game that he made) suggests bias–he ignores the political and cultural work that his own game does. Overall, the article will be useful because my research paper will focus on how the mechanics of “boring” indie games like Papers, Please use boredom as an importance mechanic as part of their rhetoric. In other words, boredom is an important aspects of procedural rhetoric in modern games.