Amphibian-based grading

I have a friend, roughly my age, who studied architecture at Ball State as an undergraduate. He told me a story many years ago about his most formative interaction with the faculty. He asked his professor how he was doing in a class, expecting a quantitative answer. Instead, the professor drew a line: on one end, he drew an egg; on the other, a frog; in the middle, a tadpole. He pointed to a spot on the line and said, "You are here."

I tell that story to my students every semester when the question of grades come up. I recently shared the story with a faculty discussion group dedicated to improving teaching practices. Everyone who hears this story immediately understands that the professor has given the student valuable information—that this feedback is much more valuable than something like "86%" or "C+".

At the faculty discussion group, one of the participants asked us if we still had any marked-up papers from our own undergraduate years. I do not, though many did. She pointed out how modern undergraduates don't even have the opportunity to hold on to such things. All their interactions are mediated by technology; all their interactions have become transactions.

Yesterday, I recorded the podcast discussion around my essay for The Raised Hand. The other guest was the author of February's essay, which will be published in a few days. The moderator identified a theme between our essays: that there is an intrinsic danger to separating people with technology. Reflecting on the conversation, it strikes me that technology allows us to have a limited communication with people who are distant, but also limits our communication with those who are nearby.

Earlier this week, I graded my CS222 students' two-week project submissions. The explicit goal of this short project is to prepare students for the eight weeks of the final project. The short project integrates all the challenging ideas from the first four weeks, and so it is designed to help students figure out which of those things they really understand and which require more attention. How should such work be graded? I expect each team to miss some fundamental concepts in their project, often things like having clear names or following the Single Responsibility Principle. If a team misses one of these, should they get a low grade because the work is wrong or a high grade because they did what I expect? A low grade suggests that they have done badly, but they have done well, and a high grade means they have done well, but they actually misunderstand important concepts.

I end up giving them low grades because that feels like an honest assessment of where they are. What I really want is to show them how close they are to becoming a frog. Why am I giving them numeric grades despite having told them about amphibian-based grading?

After grading these projects, I always tell the students not to panic about the grades. I point out that in the course grading scheme, this grade will be dropped if they do better on the final project than they do on the short project. Everyone does better on the final project in part because the short project actually works: it shows them their weaknesses. But look at what I have done here: I have crafted a mathematical system, justified pedagogically, so that I can give grades to things. It's true that at the end of the semester, I need to have enough evidence to tell students where they are on the amphibian line. It is a line after all, and so letter grades can be interpolated over it. Yet, while a tadpole is in the pond, it is nonsense to say that it has failed to be a frog.

In my podcast discussion yesterday, my interlocutor described how an integral part of education is helping people develop well-ordered desires. The desire to quantify human formation is disordered. I did not become a professor so that I could make good Canvas experiences. I became a professor to kneel beside the pond and cheer on the tadpoles. 

I write this so that I will remember it.

Introducing students to Capture Go

I am enjoying teaching introduction to game design after my years-long hiatus. The class is very eager, the sort that I rarely have to wait for comments and instead have to urge to move on.

On Thursday, we discussed core mechanics. It's something we had talked about earlier in the semester as well, but now we returned to it so we could talk about primary systems, secondary systems, and so on—and how crucial it is for small teams to remove anything beyond secondary systems. One interesting aspect from the discussion was the question of what is "core" in Skyrim: is it combat? discussion? walking about? This allowed us to discuss a designer's perspective on elegance, how it is not the same as goodness of design, but that there are good reasons to strive for it.

I followed this by teaching them to play Capture Go. I don't often cover this in my class, but I was inspired to put it into Thursday's discussion of core mechanisms given that Go is practically all core. There's just not much else to it, which is part of why it's such a fascinating object of study.

I introduced the game, and we got into pairs to play. There was an odd number in attendance, so I got to join a student for a few rounds, which was a treat. She was having some trouble seeing the patterns, so I started pointing out when I was about to win, and this led to our having better games. Also, however, she also set up her own goals, such as covering the star points; this was more important to her than winning the match.

After playing for only about seven minutes, I polled the room to see if anyone had thoughts to share. Everyone seemed to have fun, and I didn't get the sense that anyone was confused by the rules. One student pointed out how there was a strategic element to hitting the edge of the board in such a way that they could entrap the opponent. What really struck me was a discussion from another pair, where they immediately recognized that there was "aggressive" and "defensive" play. They described how, at first, one of them was defensive to the others' aggression, but that aggression seemed to win out, so then they both played aggressively. It doesn't matter to me which is more strategic; what I want to point out is that they recognized that in this simple stone-placing game, there was something deeper than simply marking spaces: there was strategy, there was a feeling, there were patterns, even if they only scratched the surface.

This neatly tied up our discussion of cores and elegance, and I have marked my teaching notes to remind myself to use this combination again.

Shove Off! at Global Game Jam 2026

This past weekend, I participated in Global Game Jam at Ball State University. This was the first time in many years that I was not hosting the event, and it was a nice change to simply jam and not have to worry about logistics.

My team created Shove Off!, a local-multiplayer arcade game. The source and binaries are also available on GitHub. The game is for four players with game controllers.

Title Screen

My son and I started kicking around ideas right after the theme announcement. We briefly discussed making a survivors-like where the powers come from masks, but we tossed it as requiring too much balancing. We pivoted to using masks of world cultures to provide power-ups in a platformer brawler game. This idea played well into our observation that local multiplayer games can generate a lot of fun even if they are rough around the edges. Choosing this to go forward, we then decided on pushing as the core player interaction would be such that masks modify it. (Incidentally, I have played Smash Bros. exactly once, and my son has not played it at all.) Our whiteboard designs revealed an opportunity for two kinds of attacks: a horizontal push from the ground and a diagonal push from the air. The simple level layout we sketched provided all we needed for a playground.

We tried to get the core gameplay working Friday night, but we could not get all the pieces together. Crucially, we did figure out the sizes and shapes that everything would need to be. We also recruited a musician who agreed to write a retro-style, high-energy song together with sfxr-style sound effects for us.

Saturday morning, we got the core gameplay and representative placeholder art in place; that is, we replaced the Godot icon with stick figures. We enjoyed the core gameplay even without powerups. Knowing we were a small team with limited time, we decided to try to build a complete game using only the core gameplay. If it was good, it could be what we shipped, and if we had time, we could add powerups. During the day, the theme became less generic and focused more on lucha libre. Masked wrestlers pushing each other off of platforms seemed the right way to go. Once the musician's main theme landed, it changed everything: the song was perfect for the madcap gameplay and bold visuals we had brought together.

My youngest son was the only one with nothing scheduled Saturday afternoon, so I invited him to come hang out at the jam. I set him on some research tasks, including finding fonts and figuring out a palette for the characters. He started by simply poking around Google Fonts, but then I taught him about the value of using image search for reference images. We brought up images of luchador posters, which changed his whole approach. It was a good learning opportunity, and I'm glad he came along, even if he had to spend some time awaiting assignments.

Starting the match

Many of the posters we reviewed featured a starburst background, and it looked to me like something I could do with a shader. I tried puzzling it out myself but did not make much progress. Shaders are interesting to me but I frequently get stymied by them. I ended up searching the Web and finding exactly what I was looking for. Sunday morning, I added my favorite subtle feature: at the end of the game, the background color changes to match the thematic color of the winner. One of the other jammers required shader cleverness in his game, and I told him how I'd love to lead a seminar on the Book of Shaders. He said he'd be interested, so I guess I only need nine more undergraduates who are intrigued by this intersection of art, math, and design.

I should mention that all of the visuals were done by my other son who was in attendance. He did a great job iterating on ideas and taking feedback, reworking the characters several times as we worked towards our goal. One of the best things we did in terms of the project architecture was to separate the body animations into their own scene so that he could work on those independently while I worked in nearby systems. We only had one merge conflict during the whole weekend, and it was quickly resolved.

By Sunday morning, we had already covered the "mask" theme with our luchadores, but we had time to build on the core gameplay. Our testing showed that players could get stuck in pushing matches, and so we pulled our favorite powerup from Friday night's listing: fireballs. Every few seconds, a stylized sun shows up in the middle of the screen, and the player to grab it gets three fireballs. These proved perfect for breaking up the gameplay.

We were all happy with how the game turned out, and it was popular during the post-jam party. I felt good about making a complete, playable, and enjoyable game. I have spent a lot of time the past several months in preproduction and exploring engineering practices, but I haven't shipped anything in a while. The jam was a great opportunity to go from nothing to something in 48 hours.

If you try out the game, I hope you'll let us know what you think.

"Artificial, Not Intelligent" essay published at The Raised Hand

My essay for The Raised Hand was published this morning:

https://theraisedhand.substack.com/p/artificial-not-intelligent-how-meeting

It is my invited response to their theme for the year, "What is the role of the human educator in the age of AI?"

An overheard comment about the importance of knowing

Earlier this semester in my game design class, I overheard a student say to another, "If you don't know much, you won't be able to think of something."

He's right, contrary to the philosophy that believes that students don't need to learn facts because they can look them up.

An Improvement in Brainstorming Game Ideas

I have used brainstorming exercises in my game design classes for many years. When I first started, the goal was to fill the board with ideas within one class period—and we did. But it wasn't that helpful. Brainstorming is recommended in Richard Lemarchand's Playful Production Process, and so I used it in my 2023 and 2024 game studio preproduction classes, following his helpful rules. These exercises can result in unexpected items, but it seems like every time, no matter my framing, the participants failed to grasp the point of the exercise: game ideation. Instead, what overwhelms the list is inspiration for theme, setting, or characters, but these are not game ideas.

I saw a different possibility when I watched Joe Baxter-Webb's video on ideation methods. The video recommends seven different approaches for ensuring that one is pursuing worthwhile game ideas. One of the approaches is to describe a game in terms of "Action Action Goal." An example he gives describes Into the Breach: destroy the kaiju and upgrade my mechs so that I can save the cities. It struck me that this simple formula might help my students stop listing things like "bacon" which everyone likes but which is not a game idea. 

I explained the structure and goals in class yesterday, and in twenty minutes, my small group of students came up with forty game ideas. The very first one was only a goal, but with a little prompting, it was revised into action-goal. The next was fully robust in its action-action-goal structure. A few of the entries were quick "Yes, and..." entries, where someone riffed off of another idea, but most were standalone ideas.

Forty is much less than previous teams have made, and that's a good thing. Everything on the list can be turned into a game, although many of the actions seem to describe narrative events rather than player actions. For example, one of the concepts was to "embarrass" someone else, but turning this into a player action would require some interpretation. 

Each student brought an original game idea to class, inspired by Baxter-Webb's video, and I hoped this would warm them up for the exercise. However, I am not sure that items on the list represent the games that the students actually want to make. I say this in part because, earlier in the week, I had them do a short analysis of a game they enjoy, but in the brainstorming list, I don't see elements of those games. In retrospect, I could have been more transparent, telling them that they should expect to be doing creative ideation in class. To me, this is clear from the preparatory exercise, but that's because I have the whole class plan in my head already.

As I was writing this, I looked at my blog for old brainstorming notes and came across my notes from Justin Gary's Think Like a Game Designer. My plan for Monday's class was to have my students start greyboxing, but I realized last night that we should some more time narrowing down what we want to make. I think I may review the notes from Gary's book more carefully and have those as a back-up plan to help the students figure out what they want to make. 

The Games of 2025

It's time for that annual tradition: a reflection upon the board games of 2025. This year involved a significant change in my play patterns since my eldest son went away to college. He is the one with whom I have played the most games by a long shot. I miss having him home, in part because he is such a good tablemate, always eager to join in a game.

Without further ado, here is the list of my top-played board games of 2025.

• Clank!: Catacombs (31)
• Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread (25)
• Heat: Pedal to the Metal (20)
• Planet Unknown (17)
• Race for the Galaxy (17)
• Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated - Darkest Magic (13)
• The 7th Citadel (12)

Clank!: Catacombs is one of our favorite games. It's one of the few games that my wife will always join in. We got the new Underworld expansion for Christmas, and it's definitely worth it for fans like us. In fact, we've played seven times in since Christmas and enjoyed every one. Clank! Legacy 2 was something I picked up to play with my younger three boys on the nights that the eldest was out with his weekly TTRPG group. We enjoyed it, and we played it once post-campaign, but it has not proven to have staying power, even though there are still many unlockable elements we have not completed.

Arydia provided some of the most fun and memorable moments of any campaign board game I have played. Three of my sons joined me on that adventure, and we loved it. It's hard to tell too many stories without giving spoilers, but if you're on the fence, I suggest going for it. The two included adventures of 7th Citadel were enjoyable, although if you play it, don't forget to keep a good map. I know that there are expansions that extend the world, but I felt satisfied with completing just the base box.

Planet Unknown and Heat both accommodate six players, and so those are easy to get out when everyone wants to play. Both got to the table more often than Quacks, which also fills that niche.

I only included games with ten or more plays in my list, but other favorites also got to the table this year. I am surprised Ark Nova was only seven and Castles of Mad King Ludwig was only three; I would have guessed higher for both of them.

This was another year of declining plays. It coincides with playing larger games more often, but also of course with my son at college and the others involved in scouts, robotics, and other events. 

2025 board games by the numbers:

• 55 different games played this year
• 293 logged plays this year
• 3779 logged plays in total
• 36 game h-index (+1 from last year)
• 19 player h-index (unchanged)

It was also a pretty good year for tabletop roleplaying games, at least by my modest standards. Although I was unsuccessful in my attempt to get a regular group together, I did run play seven games, and I was the gamemaster for each. These included three sessions of Torchbearer, two of Fate, and one each of Knave and Mythic Bastionland. Extracting this data from RPGGeek makes me realize that I need to be more consistent in whether I log plays as "RPG" or "RPG Item."