Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Reflecting on the Fall 2019 CS439 Game Design seminar

One of the great joys this past semester was teaching my game design course, which, as I wrote about over the summer, was offered as a Computer Science department seminar (CS439) rather than an immersive-oriented Honors College colloquium. I had a few students in the course who had worked closely with me before. Of course, we had good rapport from day one, because otherwise they would not have signed up for an elective with me. I think this helped raise morale for everyone, or if nothing else, at least it was a friendly environment for me. For example, rather than my trying to force a conversation on a student who is staring into a smartphone before class, I was always able to have a legitimate, on-topic conversation.

I dropped the traditional prerequisite to just CS120—our introductory programming class—and despite my attempts to recruit more students, the course still ended up predominantly Computer Science majors and minors. I left the CS120 prerequisite there because I intended to draw more parallels with systems thinking and programming than I actually did, and if I am able to teach the course again, I would drop that prerequisite as well.

I followed a similar structure as I have done for several years, still relying on Ian Schreiber's excellent online readings despite its examples being a little long in the tooth. Also, even though we did not have an educational-games mission, I still assigned a reading from Klopfer et al. "Moving Learning Games Forward" since I find their identification of principles to be such an intriguing bit of design research.

During the five weeks of production, students were required to complete one design cycle each week, meaning that they had to identify a problem, build a solution into their prototype, and test that solution. My original plan for their presentations, then, would be as I had done in the past: students give a brief status report each week to keep the class up on their progress and solicit feedback. As always, the students asked whether they could also play each others' games in class, and I, as always, described how I had never been able to come up with an equitable model for this when people are pursuing independent projects: different games require different amounts of times and different numbers of players. One of my students came up with a showcase model that privileged playing parts of each others' games over player- or playing-equity, and the class agreed to try this. It was, taken as a whole, a great success. We kept the division between "Group A" presenting on Tuesday and "Group B" presenting on Thursday. However, instead of oral presentations, each player set up their prototype and gave a two minute oral summary of what changed. Then, students were free to just roam the room and check out each others' work, based in large part on the oral summary. After trying this for one week and reflecting on it, the only change we made was that we also had a 10-minute repeating timer running, just so that students could keep track of time's elapsing. The only real problem with this approach was the one that I feared, I got out in front of, and as predicted, I was ignored over: many students did not or could not distinguish between the showcase-style review of each others work and the playtesting required of the weekly iteration. I know I said it many times in class, but when it came to their writing their progress reports, it was clear that they had the wrong model: they thought of the meeting as a testing session rather than a showcase. The reason it cannot be the former is again really that issue of equity. It gives unreasonable benefit to someone who designs a game that can be played in ten minutes. I will need to make this distinction crystal clear in future courses.

The students' projects were quite good overall, given the context. It's the first time in years that I've taught game design without enforcing any particular theme on the class, and so it was an opportunity for me to see what students are intrinsically motivated to complete. While a few games were clearly examples of "I will choose something unambitious so that I can get it done," all of the designers of such games were also pretty bored with their work and, I think, regretted the choice. Many of the games became party games, even if they started as strategy games; the party games that were made were broadly in the Apples to Apples category, and that's fine. None were direct reskins of existing games, and all had a unique appeal. Almost every other game was themed as direct conflict: battles for territory, opposing sides, reducing hit points. It struck me how overt and, if I may, banal the conflict was, but we did not have the opportunity to discuss this as a class. Perhaps it is necessary for someone deep in video game culture to make a hit-point-based game before they can make one about Portuguese tiles—or, perhaps, this says something more about the subcultures of the slice of students who happened to take the course.

The final essays from the class echoed some of the conversations I had with the students, and I am happy with the outcomes of the course. Students came to recognize how hard it is to design a game that will be fun for other people, but also how very rewarding it is to hit the mark. I think some are inspired to continue their games or pursue new opportunities. I hope that some of them might show up at Global Game Jam or other such events to keep stretching these muscles. I did not ask the students to write explicitly about how to tie game design concepts into their majors, in part because it was so overwhelmingly Computer Science majors, and so that would have turned to insider baseball too quickly.

Finally, I want to mention that one of the interesting new spins for the class was that I had two community members audit the class, one also being a university employee. I really think that having them involved raised the bar for the whole class. Because one of the auditors was noticeably older than the other students, this forced us to explain ideas and movements in gaming that were otherwise left implicit and, hence, subjective or ambiguous. Both of the auditors also brought into the student side of the class some real serious interest and, in a way, became role models for undergraduates who are just learning how to "adult," as they say.

Incidentally, the class was also shadowed by a graduate assistant from the College of Sciences and Humanities, who was assigned to help promote some hidden gems of the college. He wrote a flattering blog post just a few days ago, and so if you haven't seen it already, check it out.

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