“Paper” Syllabus – Critical Hacking 2018

Critical Hacking (UHON 401-004) 2018 Syllabus
Chris Holden, Associate Professor, Honors College, 2D
cholden@unm.edu
We meet Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:15 in SHC 12

Overview

This course is designed to be an opportunity to work at something hard and interesting: to make a game that is a part of ongoing conversations about food.

Food of course is a giant meta-topic. And we might think about our games as ways to teach others about some aspect of food, like maybe the difficulties in making sure there’s enough for everyone to eat in 2050. We are making what some might call “Serious games”; there is more at stake than the mere entertainment of our players.

It is likely that no one taking this course has done such a thing before, food is complex, and games are themselves deep, both in how they work and what we hope they do for their players.

Again, we are trying something hard. Not just for you, but for everyone.

Our main goal will to work in small teams to produce a few different playable prototypes, see others play these games, and learn a lot about games, good, and ourselves along the way. It will be an inherently interdisciplinary affair, and we will need each other to succeed.

All the details, the other readings, assignments, and so on, are designed to support this work, make it feasible, and make sure that we get something out of it besides (and more relevant to your other hopes and dreams than) the actual game itself.

Our other great hope will be that we use these experiences to move forward these conversations outside our classroom. This might mean anything from the course’s future students, academics in any of the adjoining areas, or the general public. Something we do should be capable of doing work in the wider world.

Motivation

So why try something hard with so many parts that is likely very new?

Besides the mental hygiene of trying new things with others, these specifics topics and media are at the cusp of what is possible in our world, and might yield important insight into how the 7 billion people on this planet step into the future.

Games are Important

Games and play are hugely important to mammalian development, important aspects of culture, yet largely disregarded in academic schooling likely due to a compilation of 17th century protestant values (work = good, play = bad) with those of the enlightenment (brains = good, body = bad). Academia, journalism, etc. are just starting to discover the value of these media, and game creators are also looking in greater numbers to have their games and play mean something beyond the enjoyment of time spent.

Playing and making games have been huge influences in my own life, and I want to share them with you. I believe, unlike in a math class I would teach (another of my passions), you can do work in this class that will mean something outside of it. You, even as a novice, have the potential to move forward big conversations about what games can do. Many students in classes like this one have done so. This course is set up to give you a chance to do something that can carry meaning, not a set of facts or procedures I claim to be important.

It may feel awkward and obvious that you come in lacking certain technical background, but don’t worry. One of the fantastic things is that anyone can make games; you don’t need to be a pro or a programmer. Those skills can help, but they are not prerequisites. And you, like everyone else, can and do learn new things. We tend to learn the most when it’s in service of something we care about and want to see through.

Find something in this area to actively care about, at least one thing you want to sink your teeth into. If there’s nothing here you care about, drop this course immediately; there’s no point.

Food is important

No duh, huh.

Unlike math, food is all around us. All we have to do is begin to wake up to complexity of it. It’s an issue with many facets, at least one of which I’m sure we can agree to dig into together. It’s also a good area to do more rigorous research in because no matter what you think you know about food, chances are the reality is far more subtle and complex. It’s a good chance to go from someone who thinks they know something to someone who is wise enough to not always open their big, dumb mouth.

We have lots of local resources too. This course was created originally to be part of a sequence of courses, a block. It began with in Dr. Cargas’ UHON 204 Individual and the Collective: Globalization Human Rights or Dr. Moore’s UHON 402 – Big Data, Big Opportunities. In each, the subject of the investigations had to do with big picture food system issues, and our hope was that getting to stay with a subject and work on it from many perspectives would be truly transformative. Other professors in Honors and at the University have work that deals with food, and again, unlike math, there’s a good chance that your current education and ultimate career intersect these issues. I also have a former student who is now the Head Farmer at Chispas farms. She has invited us to come check her farm out and talk food with her.

There’s no one in this class who has taken the block, so those official connections are moot. But we can ask for their resources, and your work may take on extra meaning because there is a potential for local audiences.

There are food games. Whether they are “serious games” or entertainment games, food comes up plenty often. Having games (and other media) whose intents, representations, and interpretations we can observe, analyze, and borrow will make our work simpler and more concrete. We can aim to translate an idea into the idioms of games, or fix a broken design instead of staring for weeks at a blank page.

Finally, there is a pedagogical reason for making the food-games combo. If we are all focusing on the same issue, conversations between teams can be more meaningful and helpful.

Also, maybe this is an excuse to eat in class.

How to Do Something Hard and New

The structure of our course should help make our goals probable, not just possible. Organization can find a middle road between the nearly totally open domain of our problem and a usual course where we pretend that the answers known at the beginning are the important ones. It has to allow freedom for good work to grow, and support to keep us on track or to provide a sort of baseline for success so that individual ambition across the class is not needed constantly for 16 weeks that are full of other obligations.

One hint that comes from the discipline of game design: it helps a lot to operate under a random constraint. Just think, would soccer be what it is if you could use your hands?

Let’s take a moment to think about what that means, not just as a general principle, but for this exact course.

I don’t know many of you yet, but I do know enough to expect a diversity of backgrounds, both as people and in relation to experiences directly related to food, games, teamwork, and design. I plan without assuming any real background in these areas, but if it is present, hope our activities serve to share and expand that experience to all.

Have you played a lot of videogames? What kinds? What do you think you know about how they tick and create experiences for players?
Have you worked on a cross-functional team to produce something bigger than any one of the people on the team could imagine? Do you have a sense of what holds teams together and how they can build on the diverse skills of their members, especially in such a distracted environment as one course among many?
Have you made art for others, performance or media? What do you need to account for when you have a real audience and to accomplish the work as something that lives in the world and not just on your workbench?
Have you developed skills in the worlds of writing, applied logic, graphic design, animation, sound design? What has improved your work and where do you find inspiration?
Have you read or thought much about how media, technologies, and social life evolve together, whether getting a community project off the ground or reading blogs about what the metaphorical meaning of a certain game is? Where is an ability to shift into others’ perspectives, not just believing that you’re the smartest one, absolutely a minimum to making progress?
What new tools and procedures have you had to pick up either formally for jobs or school, or for bits of life school never prepared you for?

These are the kinds of experiences and skills this course is designed to. Again, they are not prerequisites, but I know the room will contain some relevant experiences. The rest we can borrow from books, the internet, etc. We just have to find the way to bring them together and grow.

Requirements and Expectations

This work, and this course, requires that you throw yourself into it. It is not a checklist of rubrics. I of course respect that each of you have full lives outside our time together, but for that time, the bit you can devote to us,

I ask for Curiosity, and the responsibility to follow through on it.

You need to develop an interest in this work and pursue it beyond the confines of each little assignment. Closely related, you will need to try new things and be part of teams. Your initiative and care are paramount. These are values that I hope can guide us. Interpreted practically, these values imply things you will need to be able to do, verbs. Read, watch, discuss, listen, write, research independently, make notes for yourself, share ideas and build them up.

These activities serve the bigger picture in two ways:

They bring us together in a common culture. We will have an easier time speaking with each other and as members of the larger discourse when we have some shared experiences to connect us.
They are simple ways to do diligence in approaching something big, hard, and open-ended. Our little writings and readings won’t complete your game project for you, but when you do them you can feel like you’re making progress and becoming the sort of person who does these kinds of things.

Because the purpose of these activities is not to memorize information or prove to me that you read, you can take them on with your own goals in mind. Interpret them to serve your needs, or change them to fit.

Read for the ideas you’re hungry for, and take notes like a comedian recording her dreams, not to transcribe topic sentences for the quiz.
Keep up to be part of the team, because it is your responsibility to all of us.
Begin your own research as soon as you can. Touch it at least twice a week, and keep track of where you’ve been.

Class Participation

You have taken Honors classes before. Informed participation and shared curiosity are taken for granted as the foundation of the course.

Our anchor is the shared classroom space and time. Being there, and being ready to be there, and being a part of what we do there is the basis of our shared journey. You need to be trustworthy as a member of the room: from doing readings to how you listen in conversation.

Each week, there will be some form of learning experience and reflection/analysis, out of class. Typically, there will be some assigned reading and a small piece of writing. In-class and Slack-based discussions will be drawn from these materials, as well as from those relevant to your areas of independent study. On the way to our major designs, we will have at least two other, smaller team-designs.

One aspect that students find difficult is finding a way to care enough about what happens in our class periods that they use these memories in the future. Like a lot of good times, it is easy to have fun in the moment and then have a hard time trying to remember where we left off. Again, doing better is simpler than it sounds:

Taking notes in class – not facts that you need to reproduce, but keeping track of ideas and impulses, making good on the idea that our work outside class begins inside it.
Developing a long memory – in presentations and future discussions, making use of earlier discussions and presentations, linking the ideas of one shared time and place to another.
Directing discussion – What is the point of sitting together talking about these subjects and issues? I did not have the most patience with this as a younger person. Having been through it a bunch, we will all be happier with our discussions when we try to use them as a way to get somewhere, not merely pass the time.

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]
[Reflective Writing and Public Work]
[Reading/Watching]
[Writing]
[Playing Games]

We will stay in touch about official matters, continue discussions, share materials and ideas, etc. Participation is just as important there as in class. You will be asked to lead and contribute to discussions there on an ongoing basis.

While there is a backbone of shared material for everyone, this is not the whole class. In fact, it is a rather small part. 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

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.

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.

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:

Getting to know each other through a set of common experiences
Becoming familiar with the areas we’re working in
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

Slack

As good an anchor as class time is, it is very finite and particular. Not everyone feels comfortable all the time (we should work towards that though), there’s not enough time for everyone to speak enough, and there’s plenty of things for which that may not be the best tool. We are lucky to live in an age where we have free tools to support the creation of asynchronous communities online. We will use Slack to keep in touch and work together when we are not in the same room.

Slack is a free (for our uses) cross platform software for team communication, itself the outgrowth of a failed game design project. For supporting class communication, it is a million times better than email. You can use it on your phone or computer, either by installing apps or the web. Unlike courseware like Learn, this is ours. It does not disappear after the semester ends, and we—not just I—can reconfigure it to better suit our needs. All my announcements will be via Slack, and any communication about the content of our work together. Conversations can be as public or private as the participants need at the time. Planning group work is dead simple without needing another point of contact. I will communicate feedback on work due or done, among other things, but not assign grades. That’s something we should do in person or via UNM email.

From keeping up to date with course requirements, finding missing readings, continuing discussions, linking to new sources, planning and executing group work, in the last few years Slack has taken the world by storm and it has worked well to adopt in my courses (and other areas of life), largely replacing email. Slack is a really nice compliment for in class participation, and like that space, this online one will only be useful if we find uses for it.

The danger of course is that this adds another straw on the pile. A new piece of software to learn, and another thing to keep up with. This means making decisions about how and when you use it. I do not expect everyone to be constantly on call, but I do expect people to check-in often enough to know what’s going on. I feel confident in making this assignment for a few reasons. One is empirical. It has been a real benefit to communication in the courses I have used it. The others relate to what this course is about. Being willing to try new things, not for the sake of newness, but because there’s a set of problems we hope these tools help us address, and because these tools and behaviors are valuable in the world outside school.

Teamwork

[depending on others]

We will proceed as a class through this work and work in teams. There are always downsides to group projects.

But teams are life. And why? Because you can do more as a group than an individual. So we will put up with the downsides both for the educational potential of learning teamwork and for the potential upside of making something big.

There are many things that can make you feel good about your team:

Topic, genre of game, engine, etc. aligns with personal interests
You feel like your skills will be put to good use
You feel like your weaknesses will not undermine the team
You want to work with the others on that team
You feel like this group of people can be successful at their goals

Successful teamwork, like marriage, is not about how cool your partner is but how well and consistently you communicate. You will need tools (like Slack, Google Drive) and procedures to make sure everyone understands the direction of the project and that they know where and how to contribute.

You will never get all of these, all the way, on any real life team If you’re lucky, a marriage may get close. You will not be judged for not having the perfect team. Your own feelings of success can revolve around how you acquit yourself rather than the luck of your draw, if you let them.

You cannot know how a team will work together until it does See again, marriage. This is the blindspot that comes up the most often in classes. Some people know each other, and we infer a lot about the others based on our limited, prior experiences, filling in large gaps of knowledge with assumption. There’s no other way, but if you realize your assumptions are just that you might be able to discard them more easily once you do get information. Good teammates are often surprises. Bad ones too. Like a family member who is friendly enough until there’s an inheritance to deal with.

It will be unfair. Teamwork is not the same thing as dividing the work up equally. There is often someone who carries more than the rest, and it’s always obvious. The goal here is not to produce some uniform product but to make whatever you can, together. Look for ways that you can lean on individual strengths or effectively mentor each other (say if one person has programming experience and another really wants to give it a go). And don’t just let these different strengths be an excuse to go off on your own. Get to know each others’ work and make sure everyone on the team has a good sense of the project as a whole, even if there’s some part they’re not on. This is not possible on larger projects, but is one of my main reasons for working in small groups like this.

You can always break up. Don’t let communication or similar problems linger. Try to work them out and be ready to get help in cutting bait if you can’t. The only truly unsuccessful team projects I’ve seen are when a team has some obvious problem working together that they just try to ignore.

Mostly, for structure, I don’t want to lose too much time to the act of choosing teams. Assigning teams randomly might be fun but could walk over potential synergies. I don’t want anyone to end up left out. This often happens for reasons unrelated to the work being done and reflective of stereotypes like gender, race, sexual orientation and so on.

Neither do I want strictly functional designations, like artist and programmer. It’s okay if you have some experience with a useful skill set, but that doesn’t have to be your identity here, nor should it be a wall for someone who wants to try something new.

Our work together in the beginning will create some opportunities to get to know your classmates, to start discussing possible projects and teams. I only ask that you take this matchmaking seriously even if it is informal, and that you double check your efforts regarding being inclusive. Give extra chances to those who might otherwise be on the periphery. If a group or idea gets too big, we can always have two teams working in parallel. Ideally even, the closer our work is to each other (topic, genre, engine, audience, etc.) the better we will be as audiences and critics of that work. It will be more meaningful to all of us.

Try out your potential teams and teammates in our small work, design projects or class discussions. My hope is that by the time that I’ve made room to formally decide on teams for the major project, there’s nothing to decide. If need be though, we will painfully or randomly sort by Fall Break.

Timeline

We have a detailed schedule in Drive. It will be revised as we go along, but as we begin it represents my best guess of what we’ll be doing together day to day. The semester is organized into roughly 6 blocks.

Weeks 1-2 Get situated in this space and practice the kind of work we’ll be doing. Decide if this is where you want to be while you still can.
Weeks 3-4 Assemble basic research and position, read about games, their uses, food topics, practice design, play games
Weeks 5-8 Discover other game-based or educative work relevant to topic, practice design, play games, share basics with other teams, submit project ideas
Weeks 9-13 Design, research, and testing in teams.
Weeks 13-14 Public showcase, reflection on game, critiques
Weeks 15-16 Preparation of public materials, post-mortem, revised proposal.

My overall plan is to give you a good idea, in the first two weeks, of what you’ve signed up for. That way you can make the choice of whether to stay in the class or not while making this decision costs almost nothing.

The design work on the major projects is 4 weeks, starting after fall break. This is not a lot of time. Perhaps we can move it up, but I also know that many feel unequal to the task of jumping right in and that projects that get started without the benefit of context and research tend to replicate shoddy work done in the past. The work we do before this is designed to situate you in the conceptual space and give you resources and strategies. The early design experiments are a chance to work on a few ideas before committing totally.

The course does not end with your design being turned in. What worth is the design to you if all you do with it is turn it in? It’s not just for a grade, or for me. And with any luck, it’s value does not end at the end of the semester. Not to mention, it is grueling, creative work, the kind of work that is hard to fit in while you’re cramming for tests.

So the last few weeks give us a chance to make good on the promise of reflection and revision or rethinking. Time enough to make a final change, take a project in a new direction, compose and publish your thoughts and work, and so on.

Feedback and Grades

Grades are often the primary scaffold of a course’s structure. Not here. There are no points. I will not return assignments with grades on them. You are not working for my points, but for yourself and each other. They may help students stay on track, but at too great a cost to the meaningfulness of the learning attempted in this environment. It would be inappropriate to the setting and a lie.

Think about it. I’m expecting you all to come from your many majors, with different skills and backgrounds, to do idiosyncratic, creative work. While I care about communication, this means more than how you fit and compare on a rubric for formal presentation. Ditto for writing. There is not a list of standardized material or skills you need to practice.

One of the benefits in the Honors College is our reduced grading scheme, which is obvious, just, and objective if we give it a chance to be.

A – Excellent work. You did something majorly above the call of duty, and don’t have any areas with major deficiencies. There are many ways to do this.
CR – You did it. You showed up, met expectations, and completed your work to a satisfactory level.
NC – You blew it. You have one or more major deficiencies in your work.

You will decide your own success in this course, and your grade. I reserve the right to change this, but the first and usually last step will be to ask you what you’ve accomplished and earned. I am always happy to individually wade through these details on a case-by-case basis and privately, and I will always warn you very explicitly if you’re developing a major deficiency. But other than that, learning tends to be the strongest when we spend our time worrying about the work and not it’s score. Success in the larger sense is rarely doing just enough to jump through the hoops provided.

Anyone who has found something to actively care about and who can be an active part of our collective journey has never had anything to worry about in the grade department. More importantly, this also makes it super easy to write recommendation letters for me and to share stories about their work in interviews for them. Those who are looking to do enough to get by tend to secure themselves CR. Seeking only my approval is not the name of the game. I’m old and open-minded enough to recognize excellence in many garbs. And I’ve never given an NC to someone who didn’t give it to themself.

Such a hands-off grading procedure is not to leave you alone. Quite the opposite. You will receive regular, frequent feedback on your work, and I encourage you to ask for more. It’s usually a good sign that you care about what you’re doing for its own sake rather than mine. I will always provide suggestions for improvement, revision, and further thought. Smaller assignments may not merit editing along these lines, and the comments should be taken to heart for next time. On the other hand, do take some of your work seriously to reconsider, revise or extend in response to audience reception. This is one of the many signs of excellence. Good work never begins as flawless. It looks like something that is worth engaging with further.

The questions I ask take some time to get used to. If you see a document with a bunch of comments, take a deep breath. Unless this is a very final draft about to go public, think about it like a conversation rather than a bunch of edits to make. I may point out some forms of proof-reading because I think there’s something to learn, but by and large I’m concerned with expression of ideas.

Moreover, I will create opportunities for you to provide feedback on each others’ work. Each classmate is essentially your first audience member, someone who cares about this work and wants to see you do your best. Their reception of your work matters too.

Accommodations

If for any reason, elements of this class or the work it requires are difficult to participate in due to a recognized disability or similar difference, let me know how I can accommodate you. My aim is to provide a safe, inclusive environment for all learners. To begin, since this class is not lecture-based, and does not include timed-exams (or really any information storage and retrieval tasks), note takers and extra exam time should not be needed by most students who would otherwise require those in a typical class. However, this general observation may not fit all students. Again, please let me help to make this learning environment work for you.

According to UNM specifically:

In accordance with University Policy 2310 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), academic accommodations may be made for any student who notifies the instructor of the need for an accommodation. It is imperative that you take the initiative to bring such needs to the instructor’s attention through official channels, as he/she are not legally permitted to inquire. The Accessibility Resources Center (Mesa Vista Hall 2021, 277-3506) provides academic support to students who have disabilities. If you think you need alternative accessible formats for undertaking and completing coursework, you should contact this service right away to assure your needs are met in a timely manner.

Another sense in which this course needs to accommodate is in terms of the differences in its members. My classroom is anti discriminatory, not just for disability, but for gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration status and age. Our classroom will likewise be a place bereft of sexual harassment.

This part of the syllabus, required and suggested at the university level, is a bureaucratic necessity in a large school with many parts. But within that Honors is a small place, with small classes, where problems that may arise can be dealt with humanely and personally. If you have any misgivings or concerns, please feel free ask me directly, or if for some reason that doesn’t seem like a tenable option, one of my other colleagues here in Honors, perhaps Dr. Lovata (our chair) or Dr. Donovan (our most senior faculty member). I will certainly do everything I can to improve the ability of our class to enable your learning and my colleagues care more about your wellbeing and the value and integrity of Honors education than they do my feelings.

Title IX Statement

Gender discrimination and sexual misconduct are taken seriously and I am what is called a mandatory reporter. If you have problems, I’m always there to listen, and will obviously uphold our classroom spaces, in person and online (as I know you will too), where these sorts of misdeeds are alien fictions. But if you need a confidential set of shoulders, I’d recommend a counselor at SHAC or other professional establishment.

Officially,

All UNM faculty members are required to inform the Title IX Coordinator at the Office of Equal Opportunity (oeo.unm.edu) of any report they receive of gender discrimination which includes sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and/or sexual violence. You can read the full campus policy regarding sexual misconduct at policy.unm.edu/university-policies/2000/2740.html. If you have experienced sexual violence or sexual misconduct, please ask a faculty or staff member for help or contact the LoboRESPECT Advocacy Center at loborespect.unm.edu.

Academic Integrity Statement

I assume everyone is here to play a game that fits within certain rules that usually go under the heading of academic honesty. I also do my very best to ask of you things that are worth doing originally, and where other sources would be resources and not forbidden fruit. Borrowing is great as long as you cite and have something that’s your own to contribute.

And the official boilerplate reads:

Each student is expected to maintain the highest standards of honesty and integrity in academic and professional matters. The University reserves the right to take disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal, against any student who is found guilty of academic dishonesty or otherwise fails to meet the standards. Any student judged to have engaged in academic dishonesty in course work may receive a reduced or failing grade for the work in question and/or for the course. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, dishonesty in quizzes, tests, or assignments; claiming credit for work not done or done by others; hindering the academic work of other students; misrepresenting academic or professional qualifications within or without the University; and nondisclosure or misrepresentation in filling out applications or other University records

Email Use Statement

As near as I can tell, the boilerplate below says that if you use UNM email for official stuff like finding out about grades, you assume the liability that this entails. Between the lines it looks to maybe say that non-unm email is not to be used for these purposes. Either way, we don’t traffic much in grades, though interpreting this legalese is above my pay grade. Practically, you can ask me for a meeting to discuss your standing when you’re curious, or better yet, make a list of what you’ve accomplished and decide for yourself. I won’t initiate any such conversations in other media unless you ask first, and then will always default to private communications, not public fora.

Students often use email to inquire about protected and sensitive matters, including grades and class progress, and faculty often use email to individually report such protected and sensitive matters. Unless students opt out in writing to the Honors College, the Honors College and Honors Faculty will assume that all email sent individually to students via their official UNM email address (generally their @unm.edu address) is private and confidential and that the student assumes all risk of inappropriate interception of email transmissions. If students opt out of this policy, they are agreeing to only receive such information either in person (students may be required to show identification before information is shared with them) or through regular mail to the student’s official address on file with UNM.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

The atomization and bureaucratization of educational goals is upon us.

Enumeration of SLOs

For those purposes, I consider the learning outcomes of this work to be:

Produce creative solutions to complex situations by creating a game to be played by others
Combine knowledge and epistemologies from game studies with those from the disciplines relevant to your topic
Proficiency in working with others
Proficiency in finding, adopting, and creating habits of work using new technologies
Become familiar with some of the culture, history and applications of games

How will these SLO’s be addressed in the course?

The major project, creating a game around a topic, something to translate an idea or perspective into game form, encapsulates all the SLOs. Students will need to understand the disciplines relevant to their topic, as well as what they will draw on from the world of games. The project is creative, original work. It will be done in small teams where the students will need to divide up their work among many skill areas and content areas. To make games, they will need to use new technologies like ARIS or RPG Maker, game engines, as well as many other digital tools for content creation, team communication, and so on.

In addition to the project itself, each team will need to produce a proposal and post-mortem paper describing their research, ideas, and progress, where the above concerns and others will be spelled out, and a public-facing short description of their game.

Along the way, there are several smaller assignments that point to the SLOs. We will draw shared readings from several areas of game studies. Class discussions, written responses, and similar assignments will ask them to absorb and analyze information from game design and criticism, and also to relate it to their own topics. They will be asked to produce background research relevant to their topics, analyzed in terms of the perspectives presented there, as well as investigate other approaches to education about those topics, including other game-based approaches.

There is also an assignment to give a public talk about an important game (or topic from game studies such as Gamergate). Instead of seeing these as presentations for our class, these are organized as “Brown bags” for Honors and beyond, a way for outsiders to get a small glimpse at the world of games. While this gives students a chance to prepare for an oral presentation (technically not an SLO) we will also view it as another way to research and analyze our material, and to help each other succeed.

Upstream Assessment

For Honors courses, there is an assessment and rubric that each instructor must assign, grade, and share with the Assessment director. This becomes part of an overall program to assess the ability of Honors to teach its Program Learning Outcomes. For the 400 level, the outcomes and skills assessed relate to analytical essay writing. This is a bit awkward for this course; I created it so that writing a paper of the usual sort would not be the main thing we did or cared about. Oh well.

So we compromise. I am indebted to my higher ups to secure a piece of analytical writing from you (an essay). It does not have to play a large role in what we do, only I don’t want it to be throwaway or to put too much more on our pile. While most of the work we will do is team-based, this assignment will be individual. You will write an argumentative essay describing the work you’d like to see a game to do, or why a game is/isn’t the right tool, in our topic area. To support your arguments, you will have our resources about game design and its uses, as well as those defining our topic and its issues. The other area to draw on will be other works in any medium that have sought to inform or make change in these areas.

The essays will not be just for a grade but will inform our design process. If you can come up with solid perspectives on what games might be able to do, what the pitfalls are, and really use the papers to understand our topic, then they will be valuable for us all to read. Depending on the topic chosen, we may be able to use papers from an earlier course as a first step to writing these essays.