It's supposed to introduce students to a body of game history / game theory, while also letting them dip their toes into non-digital and digital game design. This is like 4 different classes being merged into one, so it's going to be hard to cover all the bases while accommodating everyone's varying experience and fluency in game design.
Many of the students will already be familiar with video games and board games -- but just as many will be taking this class because their advisor said it was good for learning interaction design, or maybe they wanted what sounds like an easy elective -- or maybe they played Temple Run once (a month ago) and they haven't touched any video games since then, but they sure like playing beer pong and basketball and tag, and those are games, right? (In some respects, the "gamers" might have the most to learn.)
Some pillars of my approach to Games 101:
- All games and game-like things are worth studying as game design. This includes playground games, crosswords, Facebook games, drinking games, gambling games, theater games, hypertexts, sports, etc. If anything, video games are the games that are the most disconnected / isolated from culture and history.
- Critical theory is important for making games. You have to rationalize your design decisions somehow. Reading what Huizinga writes about player types, or what Aarseth says about hypertext, is a way to get everyone on the same page and give you words to use. We'll still be in very different head-spaces, but at least we'll be one inch closer together.
- ... but theory is also political and has been used to gate-keep what "good" games are / what a "good game" should be / what games deserve success. We are now living in an era where video games about teenage grrrls in Oregon (or Korean space lesbian dramas) are commanding a lot of influence among critical circles and mass markets on Steam. This is great progress, but let's keep going.
- We can think of both analog games and digital games as existing on a continuum of "mediated vs. less mediated." A game of Jenga relies entirely on the physical toy artifact that are Jenga blocks, but a game of Werewolf requires no materials other than players. There, we could say Jenga is heavily mediated. Similarly, video games are typically screen-based things running on expensive hardware, but we can also play screen-less games like JS Joust that use the room and players' bodies as the main interface. In competitive play, I imagine players can run countless simulations entirely in their minds, just like professional chess players, and at that point the actual game artifact or "thing" becomes redundant. In video games, this shift has been very recent.
- Fundamentally, game development is simply the process of staring at your screen until your forehead bleeds.
Tentative reading list:
- Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2004). Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
- Homo Ludens (1955). Johan Huizinga.
- Man, Play, and Games (1958). Roger Caillois.
- "Introduction" from Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997). Espen Aarseth.
- Game Feel (2011). Steve Swink.
- Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012). Anna Anthropy.
- "The Interactive Way To Go" by Hikori Mori.
- "to the right, hold on tight" by Anna Anthropy.
- Portal 2 (2012). Valve Corporation.
- Jenga (?)
- Flip cup (?)
- Four Square
- Hide and Seek
- Tag
- Capture the Flag
- Go
- Settlers of Catan
- Chutes and Ladders
- Liar's Dice or Tripps
- Mao
- Pit
- Dixit
- Werewolf
- 9:05
- VESPER.5
- Ultra Business Tycoon 3
- Galatea
- Minecraft
- DimensionU
- McDonald's Game
- Unmanned
- Angry Birds
- Canabalt
- Passage
- Dys4ia
- Papers Please
- Cart Life
- The Artist is Present
- Fruit Mystery
- Candy Box
- Spaceteam
- watch a LoL or DOTA2 match