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.
