Two Paths to Systematizing Introductory Game Design Coursework

I have a decision to make, and there are two paths I can see before me. Seems like a good opportunity for a short blog post to lay out some arguments for each.

I have been teaching game design for several years thanks to the generosity of the university's Immersive Learning program. They have provided the funding that has allowed me to teach an honors colloquium on Game Design through Ball State's Honors College. This gets me a somewhat captive audience, since each student has to complete six credit-hours of colloquia to graduate, and the students tend to be high achievers. I wouldn't mind continuing this line of work indefinitely, but it relies upon both internal funding and political goodwill from many different areas. Briefly, it is a fragile plan, and I've been thinking especially the last two years about how to systematize this work.

The university recently announced its call for 2019-2020 Creative Teaching Proposals, and this got my wheels turning about whether this program would be appropriate to bootstrap my revisions. The proposals are not due until the end of February, but the break between semesters is the best time for me to get my thoughts and writings together.

The first path I am considering is to take my Honors Colloquium on Serious Game Design and make it into a low-level elective for the Computer Science department. Specifically, I am thinking of making CS120 (Computer Science 1) its only prerequisite, which would mean that each student would have some expected level of computing literacy. This would enable interesting perspectives on game design from a systems approach, including potentially formal modeling of game systems (e.g. state machines or Machinations), introductions to end-user games programming environments such as Construct, and important metaphorical understanding of rulebooks as programs for human execution. Also, I suspect such a course could drive increased enrollments in CS120, which I think is good for everyone: more people learning fundamentals of Computer Science can only be good, whether or not they choose to continue into a degree program in Computer Science. One of the changes that would be required in transitioning my existing course is that I would have to go from an Honors College-imposed cap of 15 students to a more likely cap of 30-ish. This is actually a significant change in the course, including a switch away from individual projects toward team projects.

The disadvantage of this approach is that, if the course is as popular as I imagine it would be, I would not be able to teach enough sections of it. I am the only member of my department who is engaged in games-related research, and I do not expect other tenure-track faculty to be interested in picking this up. We do have a vibrant collection of adjunct faculty who I think could do a good job with this course, or even local community members who might be interested in adjuncting such a course, but they would need significant support. This is where the Creative Teaching Grant proposal comes in: I could propose to create a teacher's guide to go with the course, a primer for interested but untrained people to be able to effectively teach introductory game design.

The alternative path is inspired by some research and conversations I've done around how other people in my shoes have solved this problem: Computer Science faculty with an interest in both game design and game programming, at a university without an existing program in game design. I've seen some people combine these two together into a sequence specifically for CS majors. That is, rather than have two separate courses on game design and game programming (which would be part of the path described above), they roll the two together into a two-course sequence on Game Design and Development. There's a real elegance to this, as concepts of design can be discussed alongside the technical skills required to build such systems. It also addresses a problem that I have had with the Game Programming class, which is that some of the student-designed projects are understandably terrible since we don't spend any class time on game design. The clear disadvantage of this approach is that it restricts participation to those students who have already completed five CS courses as prerequisites. I do believe that a Computer Scientist can design good games, but I also believe that a multidisciplinary approach will almost always yield better games.

Right now, I am leaning heavily toward the first path. Even if the course proves very popular but we only offer one section a year taught by me, that is still a systematization of what is now ad hoc. I suspect that CS majors and minors who plan to take Game Programming would take this hypothetical Introduction to Game Design course anyway, so that could still yield improvements in the Game Programming teams' projects.

Either of these paths I think could help lead toward another direction I have been considering taking my work. The past several years, again thanks to the Immersive Learning Program, I have been able to engage in some high-impact projects with undergraduate student teams. I've written extensively about these here on the blog, so I won't bother saying too much more about these now. However, I have been thinking about the value of having more, lower-stakes projects.

This was inspired in part by this year's recruiting of the 2019 Spring Studio team. This was the first time that I advertised more broadly across campus in addition to talking to my colleagues in complementary departments. This wasn't a very aggressive recruiting, just a few campus-wide emails sent by the Immersive Learning office. However, it resulted in many more applicants than I have had in the past—38 applicants for roughly 11 slots were submitted by the first deadline. From these applications, I had to craft what I hope to be the team with the best chance of success. This means that there were at least 27 other students who were excited and eager to join the group, but they won't have the opportunity. One way to provide opportunities for these students is to offer more low-stakes projects, where several multidisciplinary student teams can work together on passion projects rather than having a smaller team with close faculty mentoring working on a community-engaged project. In fact, we already have a curricular structure in place for this in CS490: Software Production Studio. This is the course that I created as a framework for the high-stakes projects, but I intentionally kept it broadly-defined to allow for other project structures as well. In a sense, all that would be needed is the right kind of recruiting and the department's blessing to offer a section of CS490 in the coming academic years that would allow for student teams to form and pursue their interests. This fits with one of my general philosophies, which is that we should incentivize, legitimize, and give credit for the immense amount of work that some students are willing to put into creating original games.

Thanks for reading. As always, let me know in the comments if you have feedback on any of these ideas.