Assignments

In this section, we have a quick rundown of assignments. Again, these do not represent the totality of your expected work, and you should feel more than free to look for ways to change these to better fit your ambitions and needs. But it’s a first approximation.

Major Project

On a small team (3-4), develop a game prototype related to a food topic that we agree to as a class. This project should be playable in some form. Deliverables include a few additional pieces of writing that will provide context for the game, its ambition, and tell the story of its development. With any luck it will also include conversations with stakeholders outside the class and public documents (like tutorials or websites). Each member of the team should have a substantial role, and be able to describe that role.

As a class we will need to decide on

• A topic area
• A genre or platform
• Teams
• A design intent
• An audience
• A play setting

The more of these we coalesce on, the better we will be able to learn from each others’ work, the more we will be able to say to the future at the end.

More on the Major Project here.

Reflective Writing and Public Work

Besides a game you set loose upon the world, your design project should put you in a place where you can share your wisdom about this work. Often this takes the form of saving those who come after you from having to reinvent the wheel. This could be anything from a development blog, design documents, literature reviews, essays, technical tutorials, conference submissions, or public events.

What you are able to do for the world will depend on your specific project and its progress, but there will be time to develop this work, especially after the major project public playtest, and hopefully to also revise it before it sees the light of day. This is the footprint you leave.

Smaller Assignments

Throughout the semester you are expected to research and develop your own independent and team work, culminating in a playable game demo (and supporting documentation). You will need to find and read research that is relevant, write about it, and use it to develop the perspective you hope to present in your game. Small assignments on the way, sharing your readings, annotated bibliographies, presenting on your topic, these will all contribute to this major project and keep you on track.

Here are some examples:

• Parable of the Polygons Analysis
• Analysis of another Nicky Case or similar
• Watch Extra Credits
• Read Chapters in our books
• Find and Analyze a food game
• Create a list of research questions about food
• Find and document food research resources
• Find and analyze an AR game/project
• Exercise 1 in Ch 1 of GD&P
• Review and respond to a chapter in Bogost
• Develop a set of questions for Dr. Cargas
• Develop a set of questions for Dr. Walsh-Dilley
• Make a simple Phylo game
• Make a simple game with ARIS or Twine
• Slack Discussions
• Shared notes on independent reading
• Project journals

Reading/Watching

We will read/watch some things. Not because reading is the only way to learn or because these are immortal words of immutable genius (unless they’re mine). Because it is the fastest, simplest way to begin learning about areas. That and youtube videos. By reading the same things in the same areas, we will understand our work as part of existing conversations to which we hope to contribute: the vocabulary, the people who get cited, and the stories that guide the work. This will give us a common language. There are also plenty of ideas to steal in those readings.

And if we cite them, it’s no longer stealing.

There’s frequent reading, but not dense or long. More important than amount though is why or what I hope you get out of reading. You’re not trying to memorize the contents, or prove that you ran your eyes over the material.

Reflection and application of these materials will reinforce their impact but only if you’re playing the right game. The game that reading allows us to play involves three goals:

1. Getting to know each other through a set of common experiences
2. Becoming familiar with the areas we’re working in
3. Getting ideas for our own work

Finally, I cannot stress enough how our reading list is meant as a minimum. You need to find other things to read if your work will be any good. I’ll assign stuff for us to read together, but it should connect you to things you need to read, watch, and play that are not assigned. You need to do independent reading and research. Take notes, share, make us read the best of these too.

Major Readings

• Extra Credits (Youtube series) by James Portnow and Daniel Floyd
• Games, Design, and Play (GD&P) by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
• Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy
• How to Do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost
• Topic related independent research

Supporting Readings

• Would be worlds by John Casti
• The anti education era by James Paul Gee
• Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal
• Users as Agents of Technological Change by Kline & Pinch
• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell
• Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics by Hunicke, et al.
• Tropes vs. Women (Youtube series) by Anita Sarkeesian

Writing

There is a lot of writing here, but not many essays.

1. Writing as talking. Slack at a minimum gives us a chance to start and continue discussions in places and times other than class. Communication means more than sharing your opinion and relevant experiences. If you don’t write each other to manage your projects, your team will move slowly and in a fog.
2. Writing as thinking. There are many small assignments where the point is to write out ideas and connections, observations and interpretations, as a way to work through concepts and solidify experiences. You probably know the feeling of having a powerful experience but then later not being able to quite put your finger on it. Writing is a way to be specific enough in your ideas that you really have to make solid connections and fit things together, or at least to activate a reflective mode where you start down that path.
3. Creative writing. More likely than not, your games will involve a good deal of writing. Very different than other sorts, at a minimum here, less is more. You will need to learn how to not bore people to death, create branching structure, and so on.
4. Writing as product. Whether this is one of the few polished formal pieces of writing I’m asking you for directly, or you take on the mantle of writing for a real or outside audience, there should be a big difference between a response paper and something you expect someone to bother reading. Making sure you have something to say and express understanding of your reader is key. Editing is a gift rather than punishment. And believe it or not, brevity is virtue.

It may seem strange that in a course so obviously enamored with new media formats that we spend so much time with the written word. Why?

Writing is cheap and flexible.

Writing (and doodling and diagramming) is the scratch paper for any serious project. It is simple to produce, edit, share, change. To get something good, iteration is essential, and there’s almost never time and money enough to iterate at full fidelity. So we write and read.

Likewise, writing can be parallel and asynchronous. In short, a class session only has so many talking turns in it, not enough to work through big ideas or to give everyone the floor as much as they need. But writing makes discussion portable.

For this reason, it is often the default media we use to work with ideas. For pretty much any assignment though, I’m happy to accept something else. Instead of a blog for this class, for instance, you may wish to start a Youtube channel. Instead of organizing a public lecture about important games, maybe you want a Twitch channel. Especially for your public-facing work, considering which medium and mode to make use of is an important consideration.

Playing games

It is hard to play enough games in class/homework time, but that can be an excuse to totally ignore this central act of literacy in this domain. We would not teach movie making without doing any movie watching/analyzing. So we will find ways to play games.

Just like with game design, there is no prerequisite that says you need to be an inveterate gamer. In my previous classes, previous game playing experience has not been a meaningful predictor of performance. Certainly, like any other experience, having played a lot of games can have value here, but only if it is brought in in the right ways.

• Experience with games does not put you above others in the class, or give you a right to talk over others.
• The games we will make and talk about are very different than the games most played by young people.
• There are a lot of dynamics prevalent in game culture that we will be not importing: e.g. mysoginy, racism, ableism, homophobia.

We will play several games together in class and for homework this semester. Most of these games will be short, simple web games. I would like us to play, in a nonchalant way, one title (or maybe more if we find the time) that we can sink our collective teeth into a bit more, a game whose play as part of a group can teach us about each other as players, and whose design is worth going into in detail.

This bigger game has to check a lot of boxes to work for us. In general, it has to be accessible to everyone in class, in terms of access to technology, ability, etc. Hopefully it will be new for as many of us as possible, be good enough to extract or go looking for meaning, have this meaning reachable through play without hundreds of hours, and so on. I have a game in mind, but I will give us a chance to suggest others and choose as a group in the first week of the semester.

Like readings, I will also encourage (and at times specifically assign) gameplay outside our required, shared list. You do not need to come in with gaming experience, but you do need to be willing to acquire some.