This was the first semester that CS215 was officially on the books as "Introduction to Game Design," and I expected a deluge of students. That didn't happen, probably because (1) we didn't get the word out and (2) nobody knew to look for it. Over time, I hope we can fix both of those. It's a good class, and I think students get a lot out of it.
My relatively small class was part of another immersive learning project, a collaboration with Minnetrista. I was going to link to my course planning blog post, but it seems I never made one last summer. The structure of the course was very much like past ones, and being face-to-face meant we could get back to doing a lot of the in-class exercises I enjoy so much. The students missed out on some of the digital boardgame and print-and-play content that we had to use last year when asynchronous and online, but that's an acceptable cost as far as I am concerned.
The only friction here lay in the students' final project submissions. Before 2020, I had students create prototypes and deliver those to the community partner. This has two problems: the students don't walk away with a copy of the thing they made, and the partner doesn't always really want them but has to take them. In Fall 2020, I had students make print-and-play games instead, and that format worked well in that students could both have their own copy while also sharing the content with anyone who might be interested. With this in mind, we decided to have the students create their prototypes in the print-and-play style. As described above, however, the students didn't have a whole lot of experience with this format, and many underestimated the effort required to go from their handwritten cards to something reasonably printable. I shared my experience using nanDECK, which at least one student used, but many went through a more laborious and nonautomatable process.
A related problem is one I've seen before but seems exacerbated when looking at print-and-play articulations. Many students show little recognition of how rulebooks work. This is likely related to both their unfamiliarity with the hobby but also, relatedly, with their not having to learn games themselves. If someone else is always teaching you games—including folks on YouTube—then you have very little exposure to what it means to express rules. I am not entirely sure if this is a real weakness of the course or not; it's possible that all I need to do here is encourage the students to try writing the rules earlier. The danger then, though, is that inertia will set in and they may not change the things they ought to change.
I had the students keep design logs, as I have done before. Maybe my memory is poor, but I don't remember so many people being confused about them. Very simple things, like the fact that there is one log for the whole project (as opposed to different logs each week) and that they should be in reverse-chronological order, seemed to trip up most students. I admit, though, that I may have been a confounding factor there, since early in the project I was trying to have them submit combinations of design logs and labor logs, and only one student read the instructions and followed them correctly. Now, of course, the instructions were perfect and it was entirely the readers' fault, but one should not ignore an endemic issue. When I separated the labor and design logging process, students still were confused about what each did. The moral of the story here may be that I need to more clearly express exactly what I want as separate deliverables rather than try to kill two birds with one stone.
It may be worth stating that some students didn't really keep design logs at all, not in any real sense. These students also did not have very polished projects, as one might expect. The trouble came in when I asked the students to self-report a summary of their playtesting results, and I saw some students grossly exaggerate the truth here. I hate that feeling of having to write back to a student and say, "I don't think that's true." When the response is silence, at least I am vindicated.
I still have a major struggle in this course in that the students come in with such vastly different games literacy. I had some students get mad at me this semester when I offhandedly mentioned that Uno is not a very good game. I did not expect such a defense! Others based their games off of contemporary designs such as Photosynthesis, and they're just in a completely different place in the hobby. I explained it to one student this way: imagine teaching a creative writing class where some students have only read "See Spot Run" and others have read The Brothers Karamazov.
Overall, I was happy with the projects. I have already had my end-of-semester meeting with Minnetrista where we talked about which projects look most amenable to digital production in next semester's studio course. I am excited about the direction we're planning to take, but to hear more about that, you'll have to come back to the blog another day.
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