I am grateful to once again be able to offer my Introduction to Game Design course as a seminar in my home department. Like last year, it will be offered as CS439, and I've asked the front office to waive prerequisites so that anyone who wants to take the course can do so. I published the course plan earlier today, which lays out details up through mid-semester and sketches the rest.
I wrote earlier about my revisions to Game Programming and Human-Computer Interaction. I saved my game design course for last, knowing it would be the hardest one to transition from face-to-face instruction. The whole course was really built on a model in which students present their work to each other, and I correctly deduced that working out some of the logistics of my other courses would help me focus on the substantial changes required for this course. Additionally, it was between planning the HCI course and this one that I received official word that my courses would all be entirely online: this gave me some freedom on this course to know, ahead of time, how the students would move the course, but it also means I have to go back to the other two courses and remove any synchronous aspects.
Early in Spring, I picked up two books to review as alternate textbooks, but given all the other chaos around us, I fell away from reading them and decided to stick with Ian Schreiber's Game Design Concepts. This allows me to keep the kind of cadence I want in the class despite the format change, and having used this text many times in the past, I have a sense of how students will engage with it. In part to compensate for the lack of face-to-face discussions, I have also added more readings from different authors, trying to round out students' learning experiences.
I will miss the discussions though, since this was really where the best learning happened in conventional classrooms. Most assignments in the past had the requirement to present a summary poster to class, and it was a great joy to see them all posted on the wall. I believe it gave students a great opportunity to get to know each other, as the work was clearly personal rather than abstract or faceless. I have replaced these with required discussion board posts and responses, which I have never used before. I am hopeful that we will be able to make some hay with them, but I am dubious that it will be equivalent.
One of the things I have been writing about for some time is the desire to have my students engage with some of the great games, but asking them to play more always felt like I was asking too much from a one-semester introduction. With the removal of face-to-face class time, I have injected more required playings. I divided each week into two parts: playing with ideas and working with games. The former are building the fundamental skills and knowledge for game design, and the latter is a path through important games and game mechanisms. The two work in slightly different rhythms, because the former requires responses to discussion board posts while the latter does not. I hope that the students will be able to keep these straight, and I think clever deployment on Canvas will help.
By adopting Board Game Arena and Roll20, we should be able to maintain the ability to play some games together. The part that I haven't quite written up yet is the glue between the first half of the semester, in which students build their background knowledge, and the second half, in which they work on a project. I would like to use a week or two in the middle to look more carefully at solo print-and-play games, which seem salient given the COVID pandemic. I am eager to see if students get inspired by this idea. Of course, those who want to make conventional, non-solo games would be welcome to, but only if they can articulate a playtesting plan for them. (I'll be writing up the final project specifications later, maybe before the semester starts, but certainly before the withdraw deadline.)
I started my course plan by cloning an existing one, but knowing that we would be entirely online prompted me to revisit large portions of the course overview. I added several paragraphs that explain my motivation and provide more direct guidance. For example, the introduction section says a lot more about what we will be doing in the class and about what kind of commitment students are signing up for, the decorum section has been changed to focus on online interactions, and the grading section has been rewritten to expose more of the rationale and philosophy that I would otherwise introduce in person.
I am still a bit uncertain how I am going to manage office hours and communication across my classes, but for this one at least, I decided that we should have our own Discord server. If nothing else, this will provide a convenient place for voice chat when students set up an online game together. I will need to do a little legwork before the semester starts regarding server administration, since I want to make sure the space is as safe and inviting as can be expected. Similarly, I am sure I will need to provide some documentation for folks who are unfamiliar with this system.
I will continue to update the course site as we move on, but since I got a good draft together, I figured it was time for a quick blog post. Next on my to-do list is to revisit the other two courses to remove synchronous aspects and patch back in some of the extended prose and advice I've set up for the game design course.
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