Outdoor Game Design: Foundations

(This is part of a series about the "outdoor game design" course I taught at UC Berkeley. It has notes, lesson plans, and ready-to-use rulesets for games.)

The first semester I taught this course, I planned everything down to the minute detail. I pre-wrote my lectures and my "spontaneous" jokes, allotted a few minutes to each concept for that day, conceptualized learning goals... And then realized that it didn't fit the spirit of the class.

In later semesters, I'd have a rough week-by-week schedule, but that's it. I'd improvise the lesson plan when I got to class and saw what the energy was like. (Also, being in the Bay Area, it'd rain a lot.)

So, some general statements / philosophies that form the foundation of this course:

So... I'm Probably Not Going to Make My April Deadline for 1-3

... Valve recently updated the Hammer level editor and now it's bugging out on me (as well as many others, if the Steam forums are any indication). My internal deadline was to have a release candidate in testing by this weekend, and that seemed doable -- well, until now.

I'm not blaming Valve.

Okay, I am. It's convenient. I'm a dick.

Anyway, see you in May!

So I'm Going to Parsons for a Masters in Video Games

Have you ever heard of Parsons?

The few of you that have -- you probably know Parsons only as the setting for Project Runway. You probably think of Tim Gunn scampering down a hallway. You might be correct for thinking that.

Well, I'm not going there to study fashion. I'm going there to study "design and technology" in a 2 year masters program, partly because the job market for the game industry seems so bad right now, but also partly because... let me explain:

I Should Really Start Using Visgroups

... because this grid view is simply unusable.

I'm glad I don't have to share VMFs with anyone.

Don't Get Me Wrong, I Love Increpare

... but sometimes I'm really just disturbed and at a loss as to what to say about his stuff -- "The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights" starts out promising.

The novel use of ASCII characters in this way (I especially like the "counter" and "TV") is cool, and the distortion effects are pretty nifty and sell a really cohesive, unsettling aesthetic. There's a "day" and a "time" counter but none of it seems particularly important. Your choices don't seem to make any difference. Player agency is incredibly vague, if it exists at all. Par for Increpare.

But then comes the last part which seems shocking and weird for the sake of being shocking and weird. It seems to undermine this incredibly interesting world / narrative he's built up, as if it's from an entirely separate game. The art style is different, the controls are mouse-driven instead of keyboard-driven, the mechanic is openly vulgar instead of subtly vulgar -- I mean, yes, maybe this jarring difference is meant to mirror the real-life phenomenon of night terrors, but I can't help but wonder if he could've done more than that. It seems more like a "one note" kind of thing and less of an exploration of an idea.