Teaching Game Design

Remote Lectures

2011-11-19T11:29:00.003-05:00

Here's an all-too-common lament from teachers who aren't located in a game development hub like San Francisco:
"I'd love to have some guest speakers from industry in my class, but none of them live here. Occasionally I can snag one if they're in town to see family or something, but it's not anything I can count on. And I don't have the budget to fly people in regularly."

There's a better solution out there, and it's so simple that I'm amazed this doesn't happen routinely. It's called Skype. (Okay, technically any videoconferencing software will work. But an awful lot of professional game developers use Skype already. For those who don't, it's shockingly easy to download, install and use.)

The setup is incredibly cheap. At minimum, you need:

A computer in your classroom and a computer at the guest lecturer's desk. You can pretty much count on any game developer to have a computer, and it's honestly been awhile since I've stepped into a classroom at any school that didn't have at least a computer at the podium and overhead projector.
Audio and video in the classroom. Again, most classrooms these days come wired for it. Absolute worst case, bring your own laptop. Most laptops these days have speakers, mic and webcam built-in; if not, you can get cheap-but-passable for $20 or less each.
Some way for the guest lecturer to speak to you: speakers and mic (or headset) and webcam on their end. Many developers have this already. If not, spend $50 or so to order some basic equipment on Amazon and ship to them directly; it's a nice way to say thank-you if you're not paying an honorarium, it's a whole lot cheaper than covering travel expenses, and a gesture like this drastically increases the chance they'll do it again next year.
A willing guest lecturer. Often the easiest part, since there are so many to choose from. Just make sure your social network is up to date.

Then you just have to set up a time, videoconference them in, have them give their lecture and take some questions, thank them for their time, and you're done. (Strictly speaking, you don't even need video; you could get away with just having a normal phone call, connected to a loudspeaker in your room. But I've found that being able to actually see the other person adds a quality that's worth taking the extra steps.)

Hints and tips to make things easier:

Sometimes I find that a speakers + microphone combo leads to echoing, when the microphone picks up the sound from the speakers. To avoid this in your classroom, keep the mic turned off except when speaking. To avoid this from the guest's side, suggest a headset instead.
Run a test call beforehand to do a sound/video check, maybe a few days in advance, just to get the bugs worked out of the system. If possible, do your test using the exact same setup/location where the actual call will take place.
Have the guest's phone number, in case the internet picks a bad time to go down, just so you have some way to get in touch with them in an emergency.
Make sure the guest knows how to use whatever videoconferencing software you're using, and walk them through it if not. If they have slides, make sure they know how to share their screen.
Set this up in advance. Check in a few days in advance, and a few hours on the same day, just to make sure you're still on. Sometimes developer schedules can suddenly shift last-minute, so if you have the occasional cancellation, better to find that out before your class starts.
When looking for guest speakers, don't limit yourself to your home country. In fact, it may be more convenient for people who are at a time zone that's a few hours apart from you; spending an hour doing a guest lecture from home is sometimes easier and less disruptive than doing so from the office in the middle of a work day. (That said, if you can set up a virtual "studio tour" with the developer walking a wireless webcam through their office, it can be all kinds of awesome.)
If the speaker is in a different time zone than you, make sure you know the difference, and specify time zone in every email and other contact you have to make sure there's no confusion. To make it the most error-proof, give both times, yours and theirs ("So, we're still on for tonight, 3pm ET / 8pm GMT?").
Lastly and perhaps most obviously, be respectful. While many developers are happy to get involved with education and share their knowledge with your class, remember that they are still volunteering their time for your benefit. You need them more than they need you. So be sure to treat your guests well, whether they are connecting to you virtually or in person. Do this right and they may even recommend other speakers for your class. Treat a speaker poorly, and maybe they'll tell their friends to avoid you in the future, and suddenly you'll have a much harder time with this. It's a small industry, after all...
Conferences like GDC are a great place to meet potential guest speakers. Bring up the subject gently, then follow up a week or two later to those who expressed interest.

If you've done this a lot, feel free to post any additional tips (or traps to avoid) in the comments.

The Four Difficulty Levels of Assignments

2011-06-04T18:00:00.004-04:00

As a teacher, I have a few different kinds of exercises I like to assign my students.

There's the traditional kind of assignment where there's a definite "right answer" or thing that I'm looking for. Students are at least used to this from other classes, and they are at least easy to grade: just see if the student's answer matches with the answer key. List five causes of the Crash of 83. Define "positive feedback loop" and state whether it emphasizes early-game or late-game strategy. However, I find the scope and usefulness of these to be limited; game design rarely has a single "best way" to do something.

There are assignments where the student has to exercise a specific skill taught in class, but there are many ways to apply it. Write five one-paragraph concepts for potential game projects. Design the combat system for an RTS. Write a new backstory to a traditional strategy game, playtest it and report on the effect of the narrative on the player experience. These mimic real-world design tasks and provide pretty direct training for the role of game designer. Most of my assignments are in this category.

Then there are larger-scale assignments where a student has to combine skills to take on a major project (typically this takes the form of "create a game from scratch"). This is the kind of end-to-end, open-ended design that a student won't get to see again until they're 20 years into their career as a senior designer, or until they go indie.

Lastly, every now and then (no more than once per academic term, maybe as little as once per year), I like to offer an epic challenge: something that, as far as I know, is an unsolved problem of game design. Sometimes this is something I've tried (and failed) to do myself. Sometimes it's just something I'm curious about, but not so curious as to actually take the time to do it myself. Sometimes it's a relatively famous problem that I've seen attempted and failed by many people who are far more brilliant than I am. I'm talking about things like "design a computer role-playing game that plays in 5 minutes" or "design a collectible business card game that can be played with the stacks of cards you get at GDC, with rules simple enough to be printed on the back of your card" or "write a pitch document for a game based on the Shakespeare IP."

Roughly, I suppose you could say these four categories roughly correspond to Easy, Medium, Hard and Legendary difficulty levels.

You might be thinking, "wait - why assign something that's so difficult that I can't even do it myself?" A few reasons:

Learning the lesson that Game Design Is Hard. I make every effort to tell my students that game design is not just a matter of sitting down, coming up with "Great Ideas for games" and then sitting back and collecting royalty checks while other people do all the work. Impossible assignments let me show rather than tell and I think the lesson comes across much clearer.
Freedom to fail. While I don't come right out and say that any assignment is impossible, I do let my students know when I'm giving them something challenging. They learn that in game design, it is possible to fall flat on your face... and that sometimes it's even desirable to do so, as you can learn a lot from failed experiments. When you already expect your game to suck, you're more willing to take crazy risks in an effort to fail spectacularly.
Tiny chance of success. Few design challenges are truly impossible; it's just that the solutions haven't been discovered yet. Try enough times in enough ways and you will eventually reach a solution, if only by accident (the "million monkeys on typewriters" approach, although I'd like to think my students are slightly more skilled than the average monkey). Some day, either by brilliance or blind luck, one of my students might actually solve one of these things. The student that does so is going to have one impressive centerpiece for their portfolio. Even students who don't crack the problem completely but do manage to make a small dent in it, can learn a thing or two about design from what worked and what didn't - and that lesson can be shared with me and the rest of the class.
Offering a glimpse of the next level. When teaching new skills, I like to give my students context: not just "here, learn X and Y for this class" but also "here's where you're going to use it later." By giving students some things they can't do yet, I hope to plant a little seed of fascination with a problem that they want to solve, something that makes them want to keep going... something that they can keep coming back to later as they get more knowledge and experience as a way to gauge how much they've grown as designers.

My Problem With Gamification

2011-03-11T18:16:00.006-05:00

This blog post is indicative of the kind being thrown around by so-called "gamification" aficionados. I've seen a number of others along the same lines, but this one is fairly succinct and direct, and I think it can act as a proxy for other similar statements. If you're in too much of a hurry to read it, the practical upshot can be summed up in three points:

The education system in the US is broken.
Grades are an outdated game mechanic. This is part of the problem.
Replacing grades with other extrinsic motivations such as virtual currency is superior and will give students the motivation they need to learn.

Okay, so I have no problem with saying education is broken. It's hard to find anyone who thinks otherwise these days. What about the other two points?

Grades may be part of the problem, but they are not an "outdated game mechanic" because they are not a game mechanic at all. Very often I see rewards classified as "game mechanics" but they are not. The term "game mechanic" has a specific meaning to game designers; roughly speaking, a mechanic is a description of a systemic reaction to an event (such as a player input or a given kind of game state). A reward system that describes the conditions on which a reward will be handed out, and the exact rewards tied to what actions, would be a game mechanic. A grading rubric is a game mechanic. A grade or other reward itself is, in game design terms, a resource or a reward (but not a mechanic). Anyone who is going to speak of something as a game, needs to learn their terminology.

Second, and this is where a lot of "gamification" things fail: extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation. This has been documented so many times, I'm amazed I even have to say it. You could make a valid argument that by their nature as an extrinsic motivator, grades reduce a student's intrinsic love of learning. But to say that replacing one form of extrinsic motivation (grades) with another (virtual currency) seems flawed in the extreme. They have the same problem! Here's a recent example, where the introduction of 'badges' made students concentrate on earning badges to the detriment of their learning. Well, duh!

You might be thinking: Okay, Ian, if you're so smart, then what is the fix to grades? I would say that we need to do a better job separating the grade (assessment) from the actual learning. Let the reward for learning be the fact that you're learning something awesome and it's giving you new skills and abilities, and you are "leveling up" merely by learning it. I understand we can't do away with assessments entirely, but how about we be clear that they are assessments, not rewards? Young kids start out looking at the world around them with a sense of wonder; in theory, it should not be that hard to simply not get in their way as they enjoy learning stuff.

Look at any expert that is passionate about their field... say, a physicist. Do you think they were motivated to learn physics because they got good grades, or because they thought it was inherently awesome to learn about how the world around them actually works? For that person, this fascination with How Stuff Works is their reward, and as teachers we would do well to find out what makes it so fun for that person to do physics all day, and how we can show our students how awesome that is for them, too. And this is something that the external reward systems propagated by "gamification" systems simply doesn't seem to account for.

Let me be clear. As far as using best practices from the field of game design and applying that to make other tasks more fun and enjoyable, I'm a huge fan of doing this, especially when it comes to teaching. At its best, this is what "gamification" is, and I'm all for it. But all too often I see the term "gamification" used synonymously with "external rewards such as points or virtual goods" and that is something we must all be very careful with, because that may solve some problems in the short term but is probably ineffective or even detrimental to learning in the long term.

My Education Rant

2011-03-07T16:57:00.003-05:00

At GDC this year, I was given ten minutes to speak at the Game Educators Rant. I actually went over by a few minutes (with apologies to my fellow panelists) so I had to cut the end of the presentation a little short. What follows are my notes (sans slides, and edited for strong language since this is not meant to be an M-rated blog).

I’d like to start with an apology. I like futurists. They’re really entertaining to listen to, and their picture of the future always sounds so bright. But sometimes when I listen to them, maybe you feel this way too or maybe it’s just me, I feel like they’re from another planet. Ray Kurzweil has said at a past GDC that we are approaching a time where our lifespan will increase at a rate faster than +1 year per year of time (indicating we’ll live forever); Jane McGonigal’s current spiel with her new book is that games will save the world. I’ll have a hard enough time just living through GDC week, and making games that are fun. Now I’m supposed to live forever and save the world? No pressure, right?

By contrast, I normally consider myself a pretty down-to-earth guy. But for this rant, I’d like to take a very rare opportunity to put on my futurist hat, so I hope you’ll indulge me as I metaphorically leave Earth and start making some pretty wild-sounding pronouncements.

Present Day, 2011

First let me start with what’s going on present day, because even if I can’t predict the future, at least I can predict the present. Within the past year, maybe a dozen or so entrepreneurs all got the same idea at the same time. They identified an underserved market need: there are a lot of people out there who want to learn something, without having to deal with formalized education such as colleges and universities. I’m sure that each of these has an identical business plan, which goes something like this:

Become an open education platform.
Attract educators who are willing to put their content on your site for free (maybe you’ll pay them to develop content, just to get eyeballs on your site), and pitch to other educators who want to charge some nominal amount for access. The site collects a percentage to pay its expenses and make some profit that’s used to fuel growth.
In a few years, become THE place for people to go for this, the Amazon or eBay or whatever of casual learning. Be the first to market; perform a big land grab before anyone else realizes just how wide open and in-demand this space is.
Get acquired by Google, pocket the money, and that’s the exit strategy to tell to the VCs to get funding.

In Entrepreneur magazine last month there was a full article on this emerging trend of what they called “casual learning”. So this is clearly something that’s happening right now. But before I talk about what this means in the future, I want to talk about the past and how we got here.

Distant to Recent Past

Maybe I’m an idealist, but I like to fantasize that some time long ago, the primary mission of universities was education, research, and service. Somewhere along the line, funding got cut, and schools had to make a decision: make due with less even if it means not fulfilling the mission as well as they’d like, or shift focus to getting more money to continue the mission. There was a shift towards the latter; a focus on education changed to a focus on tuition. Instead of just doing research, it became important to write grants and get research funding. In place of community service, there was a shift to profit generation through fee-for-service. Eventually schools seemed to focus on money entirely, and the original mission was backgrounded or forgotten.

Maybe we were hoping that people wouldn’t notice, and maybe for awhile they didn’t, but when we started squeezing our students with tuition increases that were higher than the increase in cost of living, we started to look like greedy bastards. And not only were we greedy bastards, but we’re arrogant greedy bastards: not only do we charge an arm and a leg for tuition, but we won’t even let them pay for tuition unless they first apply and are accepted to our school; they have to be good enough to give us money, at least for the private schools.

Side rant: when looking at tuition increases, many academics are quick to point out how their school offers a generous financial aid program that most of their students take advantage of. Don’t try to convince me that financial aid fixes any of this, unless you’d be happy going to the supermarket to get a gallon of milk and being charged $50,000 for it, but you can get it at a reasonable price if you fill out an application showing your financial need. Financial aid isn’t help for students, it’s market segmentation to extract the highest dollar possible from our students, so let’s not pretend that we’re doing any favors here.

Anyway, people got tired of dealing with formal higher education and started looking for other ways to get their education without an extra helping of bureaucracy. One of the more notorious side effects of this was the “correspondence course,” and I’m sure there were times in the past where pundits would say that this was going to totally disrupt and displace higher education, and of course it hasn’t. I mention this because it seems on the surface to have a lot of similarities to these kinds of online casual learning experiences I’m talking about, and I’m about to tell you here that online casual learning is going to slaughter formalized game education, so it’s worth saying why casual learning isn’t just the next fad in correspondence courses.

The main thing that really makes a difference is that it’s on the internet. Web 2.0, in fact. This sounds terribly cliché, so let me explain by taking my first tentative steps into what I see as an inevitable future, and you’ll see what I mean.

The Future, Part 1: 2016

There’s obviously enough demand today to support casual learning as a business, so at some point in the future, one of the existing services, or another like it, will almost certainly emerge as the clear market leader. I give it 5 years tops before this happens, probably a bit less. Look at other spaces where a need was identified and there was a big startup gold rush to capture and monopolize the space: how long did it take during the dotcom boom to go from there being a ton of competitors in the online auction space to having eBay be dominant, or for Amazon to corner the market on online book sales? How long does it take a new Web browser to totally displace the previous one? Time flies fast in Internet years, so it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that within 5 years at most we will have one company that is the single undisputed household-name go-to site for this kind of learning.

Two days later it’ll get acquired by Google, because it’s just the kind of thing they do.

The Future, Part 2: 2021

Once a single casual learning company dominates, their website will start to become a giant education collective that attracts everyone. If you want to learn something, this is going to be the first place you’ll look. If you’re a leader in your field and want to teach something, put your information here. It’s just like why everyone goes to eBay for auctions: if you want to buy something at auction you’ll go there because that’s where the sellers are, if you want to sell you’ll go there because that’s where the buyers are.

It’s obvious that learners will go here because they can get their education more cheaply than with a university, if nothing else. But you might wonder, why would an educator take their course content and put it up there, instead of doing what we’ve always done, by teaching classes at a school and publishing textbooks? The answer is our commitment to service, because we believe in our hearts that information and education should be freely available to everyone.

Ha ha, just kidding, it’s all about the money. The fact is that you’ll put your course up here because you can teach a class and get paid, oh, somewhere in the range of $2k to $5k (US) for a single 10-week course if you do the math. Or you can put it on a casual learning website, charge $100 per student, fill 100 seats and make 2x to 5x more money per class, even after Google takes their 10% cut. 100 students sounds like a lot of work until you remember that this is casual learning, so there are no assignments, no assessments, and no grading, so you’ll actually spend less time making more money for the same class. The students of course are happy to pay $100 for a class that would normally cost them thousands if they took it through a school, so you will fill those seats.

Now that you understand the opportunity, here’s the big paradigm-shifting area where online casual learning is a huge step beyond those correspondence-by-mail courses: the ability to form online communities. Just like with Amazon, students won’t just be buying a product (taking a class), they’ll also be asked to rate the quality of the content and instruction. Before too long, all the best courses will bubble to the top. You couldn’t do this with correspondence which I think is why it was always so marginal; maybe a tiny fraction of those learn-by-mail classes are actually halfway decent, but as a consumer you have no way of knowing which ones are worth it and which ones aren’t. But with technology that’s already available today in Drupal, students in online casual learning will be able to interact with each other as a community, they’ll be able to provide feedback, rate content, and generally enrich the course consumer experience.

At this point, maybe ten years from today, we will have recorded lecture series and even live lectures, given by the best lecturers in the field, accessible to students at pennies on the dollar that they’d pay at our school. TED has already done this with individual talks, so it’s only a matter of time before it happens with entire courses and even entire curricula and degrees. We’re not quite there yet but it’s not that far away and there are already people working to get us there.

So here’s the math that our future students will see. Say they want to take a course in differential calculus. They can pay $4000 to take it at a private university. Or they can pay $400 to take basically the same course from a community college, and those of you at community colleges already know this is happening because every one of you that I talk to is talking about how you have record enrollment and problems with fitting everyone into the parking lot, because you basically came along and ate the private schools’ lunch when it comes to “general ed” requirements. But 10 years from now, those students who are at community college today will instead be able to take that calculus course from Sir Isaac Newton himself, who traveled forward in time just to record a lecture series on this new branch of math that he invented, because that’s just how awesome he is, and they’ll be able to take it for $40.

And when a prospective student comes to you and says, well, what can your school do for me that I can’t get on my own, what’s the value added, why can’t I just do this on my own… if we just keep going the way we are now, we’re not going to have a good answer.

What are we we’re going to say, that we have live instruction? They can offer live instruction, and their lecturers are better than ours. Seriously, think back to when you were an undergrad… how many of your classes did you really think were outstanding, life-changing experiences taught by really skilled teachers, maybe two or three out of all the classes you took? Let’s face it, most of our faculty suck at teaching! If you put your entire faculty roster up against an entire curriculum of the best lecturers on the planet, you are going to lose, and lose badly.

Maybe you’re thinking the one competitive advantage we’ll still have is our accreditation, and the fact that our diploma actually acts as some kind of certification that a student didn’t just sign up for a bunch of random classes, they actually were able to demonstrate that learning of some kind actually took place, and the online courses can’t certify. But there’s two problems with that.

Most relevant to us as game educators is that the video game industry doesn’t care about degrees. At GDC you can see over 10,000 employed, experienced, professional game developers who only care about one thing when hiring: can you help them to make a great game? And if the answer is yes, they don’t care if the reason you can help them make a great game is because you’ve got a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, or if it’s because you taught yourself assembly programming at age 11 and have been constantly building your skills ever since and you never bothered with college because it took time away from making yourself a better programmer. If you don’t believe me on this, ask a bunch of developers for yourself and they’ll tell you the same thing, especially in fields that aren’t Computer Science. And at this point we will all be well and truly screwed.

Sure, our colleagues in the math and computer science departments will be laughing at us because they’ll still have students, because some fields will still require the certification of a degree at an accredited school. But that’s going to change too, it’ll just take a little longer for them, because of the second problem with the argument that schools offer certification as their one competitive advantage over online lectures.

The Future, Part 3: 2026

Let’s suppose I’m right that online casual education really takes off in ten years. Then I give it another 5 years out for this whole business cycle to repeat itself, but this time with certification and testing programs that will pop up all over the place to support online learning, because that will then be identifiable as a clear market need. Probably these things will be offered by the people who run testing centers for things like SATs, or medical board exams, or stuff like that, so we’ll see all these places you can go in person to take a certification exam to prove that yes, you actually do know differential calculus, so now you’re paying maybe $50 for a class and then another $50 for certified testing if that matters to you, and these test banks will actually seek and be granted accreditation of some kind so they will have the same legitimacy as our diplomas do today. And at that point the other departments will be just as screwed as you are.

A New Hope

These changes are coming. If we just keep doing right now what we’ve always been doing, these changes are inevitable because they logically follow from what we’re already seeing today. And they are going to be highly disruptive to higher education, and we should be scared about them. So… what can we do, other than panic?

First, we can talk about these issues, acknowledge that change is coming, and put our really well-developed brains together to figure out how to best address it.

Second, the price of education has to come down. MIT has actually put their course material online for free, so have Stanford and a few other schools. If your school hasn’t, ask why. I mean, seriously, do you really think that your course material gives your school a competitive advantage over MIT? How about showing some humility here?

Third, following from above, our schools will need to start seeking alternate sources of funding. I don’t know what these sources will be. Maybe we’ll start going the public broadcasting model, make tuition free, and every semester we pass out a collection plate and ask students to donate. Maybe if we’re really smart we’ll do this the week before finals, and promise with a wink that the size of the donation totally won’t affect their grades.

Fourth, we need to get smarter about marketing so that prospective students understand the value we’re giving them for their money, because they’re about to get a whole lot more demanding from us in this area. We have an image problem, and it’s not going to get better on its own. (Don’t believe me? See how many people in industry still remember the phrase “tighten the graphics on level three” and that commercial is seven years old.) We do still offer things that can’t be matched by do-it-yourself online learning: the campus experience, for whatever that’s worth; a structured environment to those students who will benefit; integration of education and research. You can probably think of some other things to add to the list.

Conclusions

Change is coming, the elements have already been set in motion, and we’ve got this huge gift of maybe 5 or 10 years’ lead time to figure out what to do about it. So let’s use that time effectively while we’re all still here and our departments still exist.

Take a deep breath. I’m returning to Earth now, where I promise you’ll find me firmly planted for the rest of the year. Thank you.

Update:

If you are interested in the other rants at this session, Brenda Brathwaite has posted her rant here (short version: if you're teaching game design, you need to teach coding), and Colleen Macklin has posted hers here (short version: stop making "games for X" [learning, health, etc.] and start making games for their own sake). Will update this again if I find that the other panelists, Frank Lantz and Mary Flanagan, post their rants anywhere.

Culture Shock: Broken Terminology and How to Fix It

2011-03-03T01:47:00.003-05:00

Going through the Expo floor at GDC is a rather unique experience. Like a highly expressive game (Minecraft or Sim City, for example), the experience is different for each person depending on their personal actions and goals. Students and unemployed developers looking to get jobs will be networking in the aisles, hanging out at the company booths, and maybe walking randomly through other areas to pick up swag or play with cool-looking toys. Professors network with industry on behalf of their students, and also visit the other school booths so they can all compare notes on who is best representing themselves. Exhibitors do... um... whatever they do. And so on.

Personally, I walk around looking for themes (this year I saw heavy representation of IT companies, cloud computing services, social media support services, middleware, geographic regions trying to attract companies, and schools trying to attract students - note the irony here, since most students at GDC are already at a school so it's a bit late to recruit).

School booths are interesting. Some show off student projects and allow you to play them. Others just show video. One showed a bunch of design docs and art bibles and other written works for a current student project in progress. Most have at least some printed documents talking about their academic programs, classes and curriculum. I always look at these to see what they're teaching kids these days.

One particular school I encountered, I won't name names, had a degree in "game design" (those were the exact words used). When I look at the core classes, I see: a token programming class, a level design class, and a dozen art/animation classes. Hopefully anyone reading this immediately sees the problem here. Obviously, the school did not.

I brought this to the attention of someone at the booth, who pointed me to a director-level person in the same booth. This director looked at me like I was from Mars, as if she couldn't understand why I was concerned or what the problem was. It concerns me because this isn't just a problem with a single school, it becomes a problem for every school. Imagine if a biology degree at School A was equivalent to a chemistry degree at School B, a physics degree at School C, and a science degree at School D. And biotech labs have to put this all together to figure out who actually learned the skills they need to hire. Even if just one school screws this up, the message to industry is "ignore the name of the degree on every resume you receive because it might be lying to you about what it means." But I'm an outsider to the school, and I have no influence to fix this myself, even though it totally screws me over, even if I'm teaching somewhere else.

I think the solution here has to come from industry. I would love to see more industry professionals stopping by the school booths, taking an honest look at what they're presenting, and calling them out on it -- in public, right there on the show floor, if need be -- if they are peddling the academic equivalent of snake oil. If every developer that passes through the expo takes five minutes to do this with just one school, any school that is just blatantly lying to its students about the value of its curriculum will hear that message over and over, loud and clear. So... any takers?

Games are Publications

2011-02-20T21:22:00.005-05:00

I was just asked an interesting question by a Ph.D. candidate: "how would I, as an academic researcher, contribute to the field of video game design?"

This is interesting because it seems so straightforward and obvious, but really thinking about it led me to a series of conclusions that really show both the similarities and differences between academia and industry.

Here's the "obvious" answer (well, obvious to anyone in industry): you don't. Industry largely ignores academic research. This isn't because game designers are a bunch of haters, it's for purely pragmatic reasons:

Academic papers tend to be "rigorous" which is a nice way of saying that they take forever to read before you get to the useful parts;
Even if we did have time, there's a dearth of peer-reviewed academic journals that specifically address game design, so we would have to hunt through all kinds of unrelated journals just to find something that's even relevant to the field;
A lot of academics have no understanding or experience of industry, and therefore publish research that is useless to practitioners, so you have to read through multiple game design papers just to get one that you can use at all.

All of these things mean that finding useful academic research takes an awful lot of time, and time is the one thing game developers never have. We're working on a game, for Pete's sake, and it has to ship yesterday. Who has time to read through journals? We'll read Game Developer Magazine and maybe some articles on Gamasutra, but that's the most we can hope for. And publishing there won't get an academic researcher promotions or tenure, so forget it. Hence, researchers shouldn't bother, the majority of the time.

But wait -- does that mean that the field of game design is stagnating, if there is no way to push cutting-edge research to the field? Quite the contrary; we see innovative and iterative designs all the time. So how does the field build on itself, if there's no research? Thinking about this uncovers a flaw in the original question: it is built on some assumptions about the function and form of academic research.

In the sciences, at least, here's how it works. Suppose you're a research faculty. You do some research. You publish your results in a peer-reviewed refereed journal. Professional R&D folks in industry follow at least the top-tier journals to stay current on cutting-edge techniques and technology. The academic journal represents a primary source of knowledge that builds on itself over time. The original question assumes that game design works like this too. It doesn't.

Here is how professional game designers do research: they play games. Unlike other parts of a video game, the design is laid bare whenever you play. By playing you can explore the mechanics that were designed. Any mechanics that are hidden from you, such as combat formulas or enemy stats, can be found in a published hint guide (which is the closest thing we have to a public design document, most of the time). This allows us to analyze and study games directly. We ask questions like "how do these mechanics create a positive or negative player experience?" and "why did the designer choose to implement that feature in this particular way?" and "what are the weak points of this game, and how would we fix it?"

It is really a wonderful form of "publication"; imagine if scientists did not merely publish the results of their experiments, but also made their petri dishes and cell lines and laboratory equipment and whatnot available, and these were included in each journal so that the reader could precisely replicate their experiments at home! This is what published games are for game designers. Play is the game design equivalent of reading an academic journal. (Oh, how I love this field.)

So, this brings us to the non-obvious answer to the original question: to contribute to the field of knowledge that is game design, make a game and release it. If your game does something interesting, game designers will play it, analyze it, pick it apart, learn from it, and incorporate its lessons into their future designs.

It also means that all game designers, whether in academia or industry, are doing cutting-edge research, and every published game is peer-reviewed.

Placement of Students in Industry

2011-01-19T18:44:00.003-05:00

Wow, it's been awhile since I wrote anything here. The busiest schedule ever will do that to some people, so for those of you patiently waiting here, I apologize.

I just finished having an epic Twitter discussion with @bbrathwaite and others today, and it made me want to write out in long form something that's been bugging me a bit lately.

Among entry-level jobs in the game industry, it is definitely not one-size-fits-all. The best entry-level jobs offer outstanding work environments, working under amazingly talented senior staff; students who land these kinds of jobs are likely to learn a lot, and go on to positions of prominence in their own right years later. The worst entry-level jobs are little more than meat grinders, throwing inexperienced students in a bullpen and working them to a soul-crushing death on largely uninteresting and unrewarding projects, without providing much in the way of learning opportunities (let alone decent pay or benefits). The majority of jobs are somewhere in between the extremes.

Likewise, students themselves fall along a bell curve. Some are superstars, some are abysmal, and the majority are somewhere in between. Now, the really terrible students probably won't even graduate, let alone make it into the hyper-competitive game industry, so that problem solves itself. The mediocre students, they can get mediocre jobs, and hopefully the reality of the industry will give them enough of a new perspective to bring out the best in them (or conversely, they'll decide that the industry isn't all it's cracked up to be, and they'll gracefully exit) -- again, problem solved. But what to do with the really amazing students?

My personal feeling is that for the really amazing students, they deserve better than the worst the industry has to offer. I'm talking about the students who have already distinguished themselves before they graduate -- the ones I would hire myself, in a second, if I owned a game company. I do not want the best and brightest our schools have to offer, getting thrown into a meat grinder. There are better jobs out there, and I would like to see the most deserving students get the best opportunities. Ideally, their school (or at least one of their instructors with industry connections) helps place them in a good studio. At minimum, they should be taught how to sniff out and avoid the really bad studios, how to detect the warning signs of a toxic work environment.

Mine is not the only school of thought on this matter. Maybe you'll recognize some of these attitudes:

Industry experience matters a lot. Even the best student can't hold a candle to an average person with even 1 to 2 years of experience on a real development team. Don't hold students in such high esteem. (To which I would respond: as a teacher, I'm supposed to disrespect my students?)
The first job always sucks. That's typical for the industry. Newly-minted graduates need to "pay their dues" just like the rest of us. (I would say: just because something is commonplace doesn't make it right.)
Don't forget how competitive the game industry is, especially these days with so many layoffs, and industry-experienced people applying for entry-level positions. Any job is better than no job, and even the best students should be thankful for even the worst opportunity. At worst, they can still add "industry experience" to their resume. (I think this sets up a false choice, as if a student's only options are "bad job" or "no job." As I mentioned, there are hugely positive entry-level experiences out there, even if they are rare. Maybe I'm too much of an idealist, but I think that a few rare people are good enough that they deserve better.)

I wonder, though, if this comes down to a difference between the viewpoint of an educator and that of a hiring manager. I'm thinking primarily about what is best for my students; they are thinking about what is best for their company; and the two are not always the same.

Top two reasons why student projects fail

2010-09-28T14:31:00.004-04:00

This article is not only for students, but also for faculty who are advising students on their projects (either extracurricular, or as part of a project-based "Capstone" course).

The sad reality is, most game development projects fail. This us true for student projects, and it's also true for big-budget "AAA" industry projects. With industry projects the reasons for this are many and varied, though there are some common themes; there are tons of project post-mortems available for you to see for yourself on sites like Gamasutra.

With student projects, failure is much easier to predict, because I think the vast majority fail for one of two reasons: overscope, and overreach.

Overscope starts like this: "I love playing God of War / Gears of War / World of Warcraft / Something of WarSomething. You know what would be great? If we made a game just like that, only better!"

Some professional industry projects start like that too. These are called "sequels." If made by a different team, they are instead called "clones" (or if you're feeling generous, "homages" or "spiritual successors"). Why can the industry succeed at this (sometimes) when virtually every student team fails miserably?

The main reason is pure hours worked. Let's take a typical console game: you're talking a team of anywhere from 30 to 200 people, working 40 to 80 hours a week, for 2 to 5 years. Even at the low end, that's 30 people x 40 hours/week x 100 weeks = 120,000 hours. Add to this the productivity difference between experienced professionals and totally green students (with programming this has been measured to be somewhere around a 4x to 10x difference), so a high-school or college team would need to put in 480,000 hours to make "the next Gears of War" or whatever. And that's a minimum. For a typical student who has the time to commit maybe 10 hours per week, that student needs 47,999 close friends. It's not gonna happen!

When I see a student saying they've got a 20-person team to make a game, I cringe. That is way too many people; communications overhead will kill the project alone, if scope doesn't! If that many students are interested in making games, they would do far better to organize themselves into a few 3 to 6 person teams, work on separate projects, and occasionally swap around their works-in-progress to the other teams for playtesting and honest feedback.

What's the cure for overscope? Go to the other extreme. Design a game that you can do in one week or less. If the game comes out looking good, you can always spend the next week adding another small set of features. If it comes out horrible, you're not so attached that you can't abandon it and try again with a brand new project. This does mean an adjustment in expectations -- you might not make the next Final Fantasy game, but you can make the next Tetris, the next Everyday Shooter, the next Spelunky!, the next Narbacular Drop. Look at the IGF winners, particularly the Student Showcase winners. Look at the best games from Global Game Jam or other high-profile events like it. Don't make a massive, sprawling game; make a small, tight, focused game that does one thing and does it well.

Genres to stay away from: RPGs, Sims, "open world" games, and anything else that is extremely content-heavy. A student team just can't churn out as much content as a large team grinding for years, so even if you manage to make a working engine (which in itself is questionable), at most it'll feel like a short demo -- several years of your life for ten minutes of gameplay is not a good use of your time. The only exception is if you can distill the genre to its core: an RPG playable to completion in 5 minutes, a Sim with only one action, an "open world" game that takes place within a single screen with no scrolling, or some other ridiculously simplified variant.

Overreach is an entirely separate problem, although it's often true that both problems manifest on the same projects. Overreach sounds like this: "Yeah, I've never designed a game before... and I only know a little programming... but I have this Great Idea for a game, and I'm sure I can figure it out if it means seeing my idea come to life."

Why is this a problem? First, some basic facts about game development:
Designing games is really hard, especially for someone who hasn't done it before.
Game programming is really hard, even for someone who knows "normal" programming, and especially for someone who knows no programming at all.
Making good-quality game art and audio are really hard, especially for someone who hasn't done it before.
Making an original game is really hard, even if you have done it before.

Combine any two or more "really hard" tasks, and it becomes a pretty much impossible task. This is the mistake that an overreaching student makes: they are trying to run without having learned to walk or even crawl.

The cure for overreach is patience. If your Really Great Idea is worth making, learn how to make it before you try to actually make it. If you're learning programming, then just learn programming -- program something that is already designed (i.e. a "clone" of another game), and that already has art (you can either use placeholder images like colored squares that you threw together in Microsoft Paint, or you can use free tile sets available all over the place on the Web). If you're learning game design, just learn design -- make a board game or card game, and stay far away from any kind of programming task. And so on.

Once you've built the development skills, one at a time, you'll be ready to put them together to make an original game. But jump in too early, and you will likely never finish.

Why I Love Social Media

2010-07-29T13:38:00.002-04:00

I realize I haven't posted here in awhile, mostly because I've been kind of busy. But something that's occurred to me recently is how social media is becoming a really great thing for games education.

To be clear, most of my students are on Facebook so they can share drunken pictures of themselves with their friends (and then get chewed out by me for it when I point out that this is what their future employers are going to see). My students are generally not on Twitter, and don't see the point. In both cases, I think my students often miss the point, and lately I've taken to being more aggressive about promoting the upsides.

The teachers I talk to are split more evenly. Some are totally into social media, others have dabbled but haven't really taken the next step, and others haven't drunk the kool-aid yet.

Why Students Should Care About Facebook

Pretty much the entire game industry is on Facebook. If you want to get into the industry, you had better have a Facebook account. This is a great way to keep in touch with people you met at GDC or your local IGDA meeting or whatever. Guess what those industry people post on their Facebook status? If you said "job postings" give yourself a virtual ribbon. (You should probably have a LinkedIn account too, because everyone in the game industry has one of those too, but you can't play games on LinkedIn.)
Like it or not, Facebook is now a non-trivial part of the game industry. Zynga's annual revenue from FarmVille alone is greater than that of most AAA retail games. Social games are a new breed of game (at least on this scale), and students - especially those about to graduate - had better pay attention, because right now there's an increasingly good chance their first job will be working on one of those.
There's a lot to learn (good and bad) from the play patterns of social games, that can be applied to other kinds of game designs. In particular, the use of metrics to inform design and the ways that games use social cred as a game mechanic are things that can easily carry over into other multiplayer games, from board games to console or online PC games.

Why Students Should Care About Twitter

The entire game industry is also on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, you don't have to be a personal friend of David Jaffe to follow him.
Yes, a lot of tweets are things like what your favorite developer is having for lunch that day. Guess what: this is a great way to see game developer culture from the outside. Want to have some idea of what it's like to work with these people? Follow them and see what they sound like.
Every now and then you get to see some amazing back-and-forth conversations happening in real-time between some of the most brilliant minds in the industry.
Yes, people tweet job postings, too. Perhaps more frequently than they do in their Facebook status, even.
If you can't afford to go to a conference like GDC but you're interested in what's happening, follow the Twitter stream. Each individual tweet doesn't say that much, but in aggregate you can extract a lot of meaning and get all the major high points - it's the next best thing to being there.
Perhaps most importantly - and this is true for both Twitter and Facebook - their value is multiplied once you're actually in the industry. Right now with the social network I have, I don't use social media to swap drunken stories; I use it to swap valuable information. Just the other day, I asked about who had done research into the psychology of how people's estimates of odds/probability go horribly wrong (I wanted this info for a class I'm teaching) and got a bunch of great references. Later, someone I follow asked if there was such a thing as a game design notation, and I was able to point them to two examples. It's like trading money! (And anyone lucky enough to be following either conversation got the benefit of seeing all of the questions and responses in real time.)

Why Teachers Should Care About Facebook

It matters to students (see above). If your students are trying to break into the industry and this helps them, it should be relevant to you.
It's an interesting way to connect to your students outside of class, in a more casual/social setting.
It's a great way to keep your own connections with industry and other educators you know. (And former students who join the industry, who make some of the best connections of all.)
Facebook games provide great fodder for classroom analysis and discussion about game design. And if you happen to play these games on your own for fun, you'll never be lacking for neighbor requests / item gifts if you ask your students for them ;-)
You can create groups on Facebook, for free, and use these to supplement your classroom learning. Yes, a lot of schools have their own courseware like Blackboard, but that has the disadvantage that it's a separate, isolated place where students have to go. They go to Facebook anyway, so it's a lower barrier to entry if they can post pictures and status updates and then check on their classes as long as they're there.

Why Teachers Should Care About Twitter

As with Facebook, it's relevant to your students so it should be relevant to you.
If class happens to be scheduled during a big industry conference, keeping a live Twitter feed on the overhead projector is an interesting way to generate some spontaneous discussion (though it can be distracting).
It's a very immediate way to connect with your class. If you have a random thought from home at 10pm that you think would be relevant for your class, tweet about it and use a specific tag (like your course number) so your students can follow. You can also issue challenges to your students outside of class and have them retweet their responses... like, "change a rule of Tic-Tac-Toe to make it better, in 140 characters or less" and see what they make of it.

Game Balance Concepts

2010-06-21T23:04:00.004-04:00

So, for those of you who recall, I ran a free online class last summer. (If you missed it, all of the content is still there, and you can feel free to look through it at your own pace.)

Well, I'm doing it again this summer. Game Balance Concepts is a ten-week course that will go in depth in the topic of game balance.

Why do this again? Because I'm clearly insane. Also, I'm hoping to actually get paid for my time. But mostly, it's because game balance has always been an interest of mine, and it's the kind of niche class that I would never be able to teach (or even propose as a Special Topics course) as an adjunct. So, this is the best method I have of creating an experimental course with original content, just to see what happens.

At any rate, the class starts on July 5, so come and join me.

Takeaways from GECS

2010-06-11T00:18:00.003-04:00

I'm just getting caught up from attending GECS last week and meeting a bunch of other really awesome people. The focus of this workshop was using games to teach STEM courses; usually the crowd I hang around with is game developers who get into teaching, but here I saw more educators who were taking steps into games, so it was a bit of a different perspective. Here are the lessons I learned:

There is interest in games beyond "game development" schools and departments. Some traditional educators see games as a means to an end, a way to make their content more accessible. From their perspective, they couldn't care less whether it's games, or inquiry-based learning, or circus clowns, as long as it gets their critical course content to stick in their students' brains. This is certainly not always the case -- there are plenty of professors who delve into games because they are gamers -- but there are others who are unfamiliar with games but are still trying to use them because they want to be effective teachers. The game industry (especially those of us who teach) need to reach out more to other departments, rather than staying in our own comfort zones.

Games are not the only way to teach. While some "serious games" people like to tout games as some kind of panacea that makes all learning activities more fun and engaging, the best examples of so-called "games" that I saw were not taking advantage of the interactivity so much as non-game elements that are engaging. One example, by engineering professor Brianno Coller, illustrates this. He opens a course in Control Systems by presenting this racing-car game, where the car is controlled by some very simple source code. It starts out not doing anything; he tells it to move forward, and the car drives straight into the first wall. He then tries to get it to take a corner, by steering towards the center of the road (with the tightness of the turning proportional to how off-center the car is -- if you're at the side of the road, you swerve wildly, while a slight displacement only requires a slight correction). This seems intuitively like it would work... but when you run it in the simulation, something strange happens. The car takes the first turn, but then starts veering wildly out of control, vastly overcorrecting for its position, until it eventually gets so far out of line with the road that it crashes into a side. This leads into a discussion and exploration of why that happened, how to correct it through a phase shift, and all of the calculus and other heavy math that you need to derive it. He has found that this method of teaching is far superior to simply diving into the equations with no context.

Is Brianno's course superior because it uses games to teach? I don't think so. Instead, what he's doing is opening his lecture with a real-world mystery, something the students can see that is interesting and counterintuitive, and then he goes through the course material to solve it. Once he's got that "hook" the students are much more interested in learning the material, because it's not just a bunch of random facts and equations anymore... the learning has a purpose. And while that mystery may be presented within a game world, I don't think it's the game that gets student interest as much as the mystery itself.

A storm is coming, and it is going to suck. One concern I'm seeing from a number of people is that game industry growth is not keeping pace with the number of graduating students from game-related programs, and yet the number of academic programs is still increasing. As a result, I think the industry is going to get more and more competitive over time, and things are going to be pretty rough for students for awhile (until we find some kind of equilibrium). Corollary: it's likely that we will see more industry "abuse" of fresh students, in terms of expecting long hours and lower pay, since there is more labor supply than demand. Reputable schools should warn their current and prospective students about this trend. (Don't worry about dropping your enrollment numbers; in practice, you're not going to be able to talk most students out of choosing a game development major, anyway.)

Another storm is coming, and it is also going to suck. One by-product of the many industry layoffs this last year, is that a lot of ex-developers are considering teaching as a career, which is a great thing. However, to save costs, a lot of schools have been taking advantage of this by hiring more adjuncts and reducing their full-time staff. This is exceedingly dangerous on the part of the schools that do this, and here's why: the game industry is cyclical in nature. When the next upswing hits and the industry goes on a hiring binge again, schools can expect at least half of their adjuncts to leave. If a department that used to be 50/50 between full-timers and adjuncts goes down to 20/80, and then half of the adjuncts leave, the result would be devastating.

We think there are more academic standards than there actually are. How many schools has the average faculty taught at? I don't know, but the answer seems to be pretty low. And yet, a lot of people I talked to just assumed that their experience would extrapolate to every school in the country. One example is the assumption that adjuncts always get paid less than full-time faculty; I've run into some schools that pay them about the same per course (it's the same course, after all), and other schools that actually pay adjuncts more, on the theory that (a) they need to partly make up in cash what they don't pay in full-timer benefits, and (b) a lot of adjuncts have day jobs, so teaching is effectively "overtime" work for them, and they need the extra pay as incentive to put in the extra hours. Another assumption is that full-time faculty always teach a certain number of courses each term; I've seen requirements of anywhere from 5 courses per term down to one course per year, depending on the school, the department, and how much research the faculty is doing outside of their classes. Another assumption: everyone complains about how hard it is to work across departments because they are "silos" and yet I've seen some rare schools where inter-departmental collaboration is the norm. It seems to me that each school is different, and there are few if any standard practices that really apply everywhere. I was just a bit surprised at how many career faculty seemed unaware of this.

Upcoming Events

2010-05-20T18:52:00.003-04:00

Looking for something game-related for your students (or you) to get involved in? Here's what my calendar looks like for the next few months:

Health Games Challenge: this weekend (May 21-23)! A 48-hour game jam (i.e. build a game from scratch in a weekend) based on the Apps for Healthy Kids competition. We have seven sites: Boston MA, Seattle WA, Albany NY, Athens GA, Fairfax VA, Orlando FL, and Pittsburgh PA - site info is available on the event website. If you're not near a site, you can still participate from home; send an email to info@healthgameschallenge.org stating your intentions. I like game jams to begin with, as they provide a great experience in a short time; this one in particular is interesting because the end result might actually do some good in the world. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the organizers for this event.)

Games in Education and Computer Science: June 3-4. Registration is closed for this workshop, but if any of you happen to be going, I'll see you there. Participants will work together to identify problems and solutions in the space of using games in engineering / computer science education. Work groups will producer reports (similar to Project Horseshoe), so expect a post here, after the fact.

Game Education Summit: June 15-16. I attended this last year in Pittsburgh, and there is no better place to meet people who are interested in the intersection of games and education. This year it takes place in Los Angeles (a bit far for me to drive, so unfortunately I can't attend this time), but highly recommended if you're in the area and/or have a travel budget.

Origins: June 23-27. This consumer-focused game convention takes place in Columbus, Ohio and is the third largest such event in the world (after Gen Con and Essen Spiel). Teachers get in free as usual (you need to show some kind of academic credentials). While there are some education-focused sessions, mostly it's about immersing yourself in playing all manner of non-digital games. This makes it more useful for game designers than, say, programmers or game audio folks.

Protospiel: July 9-11. I went to this last year and it was the most amazing experience I've ever had as a game designer. It is essentially a small gathering of non-digital game designers who spend a weekend playtesting each other's games. These are people who understand games, design, and playtesting, so it is about the best kind of feedback you can possibly get. Potentially instructive for students who want to see what real playtesting is like. The down side is that it's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so it may not be in your area. If you are in the Austin, Texas area, there's also the inaugural Protospiel South coming up soon (May 28-30).

Overall, it's looking to be a busy and eventful Summer!

Adjunct versus Full-time

2010-05-16T11:30:00.002-04:00

In the game industry, there is a big difference between working for a single company full-time and being a freelancer. In education, we use the term "adjunct" instead of "freelance" but they are essentially the same thing. There are benefits and drawbacks to each.

Benefits of Freelancing/Adjuncting

You can make your schedule as light or heavy as you want, with a proportional increase or decrease in pay. Since you're paid by the hour (or by the project, or by the class), "unpaid overtime" is not in your vocabulary. And if you've got the extra cash to hold you over and you feel like taking a month-long vacation between projects, no one's going to complain.
For industry freelancing, you typically make more money per hour than you would if you were salaried. Stupidly, the reverse seems to be true for adjuncts at many schools, but this will vary from school to school.
You are, essentially, your own boss.

Drawbacks

Everything listed above has a flip side.
You only get to "set your own schedule" if you successfully drum up business. Sometimes your services just don't seem to be needed by anyone, and if you don't have a nice fat cash reserve, you starve. Other times it seems like everyone wants you to do something, and you have to turn down work because you just don't have the time. Freelancing is a feast-or-famine world.
You'll also find that psychologically, it is really hard to turn down work when someone is offering you cash. Even if it puts you in "crunch" mode to get everything done. Even if the project is a boring, soul-sucking grind. Saying "no" is a skill that most of us need to learn, and we learn the hard way.
You know about that "make more money per hour as a freelancer" thing? There's a reason for that. First, it's to compensate for the times when you don't have any work. Second, you don't get benefits -- no 401(k), no health or dental plan, no free games and snacks in the break room -- unless you pay for them yourself. So even though you get more money per hour of your time, overall you usually end up making less money per year than you would at a full-time job. (Naturally, this is even worse as an adjunct at schools where you get paid less per class than full-timers.)
You basically must have a fair amount of experience working full-time at a game company. For industry freelancing, you need a proven track record, but more importantly you need the personal contacts that come with the territory -- who do you think is going to hire you? For adjunct teaching, the whole reason to hire you instead of having a full-timer teach the class is that you've got field experience. So, freelancing is not an option that's open to you fresh out of college; it's a door that opens up slowly as you gain experience, and the more experience you have the easier it is. (If you've got 10 years experience like me, you get most of your business through a few key contacts. If you've got 30 years experience like some people, all you need is to Tweet saying "I'm looking for contract work, any takers?" and you get a dozen offers in five minutes.)
There are a lot of little hassles that are fairly trivial on their own, but collectively make your life a little more annoying. You have to bill clients and wait for them to pay you, rather than just having ADP send you a direct deposit automatically. Your taxes are more complicated because you receive a dozen 1099s instead of a single W-2. You have to keep separate folders for the multiple projects you're working on, and double-check every email to make sure you're not sending proprietary Company A information to the guy at Company B by mistake. You have to do some research on health insurance, rather than just checking a box next to Self, Spouse or Family on the HR booklet.
Yes, you're your own boss. As your own boss, you're a slave driver.

You can, of course, get the best of both worlds by having a day job and then moonlighting. Assuming your day job doesn't have you working so many hours that you wouldn't have the time.

The Good and Evil of Internships

2010-04-23T10:40:00.000-04:00

Internships are typically short-term jobs targeted at students. In theory, the company gets the benefit of a "try-before-you-buy" way to evaluate potential junior-level hires before they graduate: that is, hiring a new person is much less risky if you've already worked with them before (assuming you actually liked their work, of course). In exchange, the student gets that all-important industry experience that gives an edge when they seek full-time jobs after graduation. Oh, and the company gets cheap labor. And the student gets to work on an awesome project like a game they'd like to play, which is like the bestest summer job ever.

In theory.

In practice, there are pitfalls on both sides.

From a company's perspective, interns aren't as cheap as you'd think. What you aren't paying them in wages, you're paying for in time: your average intern needs a bit more hand-holding (or as we call it, "management") than your average full-time employee, which means they are sucking time away from your more productive full-timers. If a $7/hour intern takes up an hour a day of your $80/hour programmer's time... well, you can do the math, but it's a bit more than it looks like on paper. And what do you get in exchange? Game companies don't typically want cheap employees, they want productive employees, and someone who (by definition) has no practical experience is not necessarily going to be that productive. Yet.

From a student's perspective, it's not all sunshine and roses either. Yes, you're working "at a game company" but what are you actually doing there? You are probably not working on anything mission-critical. Maybe you're doing QA, where you at least can't do any real damage if you suck at your job, but if your end goal is to be (say) a level designer then you're not really learning much about how to, you know, design levels. Maybe you're given menial tasks like taking notes in meetings, making copies, and picking up food deliveries. Or maybe you're given a real, honest-to-goodness game development task in your preferred field, and at that point you should be wondering why the company is getting away with paying you so much less than the other people who are doing the same work in the cubicles next to you.

This subject has come up a bit lately because of the somewhat common game industry practice of unpaid internships. There are some problems here:

In some cases, they are actually illegal. The criteria vary from place to place, so companies doing this would do well to consult a lawyer.
Even if it is technically legal in one particular case, there is the potential for others to see the practice as exploitative.

Is it actually exploitative? In my experience, no. The studios I've seen that offer them tend to be very up front about the fact to any potential interns. For exceptional interns, the companies do usually pay them (as long as they don't go parading it about the other interns). Because they are getting free/cheap labor, they're willing to work around the intern's schedule -- it's not a 40-hour work week so much as "show up whenever you want, choose your own hours". It's hard for me to call this exploitative, certainly not on the order of third-world child labor sweatshops or anything.

This is particularly relevant for schools that have game dev programs, as most of them encourage their students to get internships, some schools actually require that students have a documented internship for graduation, and others offer course credit for internships (paid or not). In particular, this means schools need to:

Do some due diligence. Be aware of the labor laws in your area. I don't know if a school could get in legal trouble for deliberately steering its students towards illegal work, but I wouldn't want to chance it.
Keep up with local companies. Know which ones offer internships. If any of them offer internships that are technically illegal, it would be a great opportunity to gently notify them of this fact (for their benefit, so they can protect themselves -- it's probably just a matter of the studio not being aware).
Educate your Career Center, professors and students. For students especially, make sure they understand the issues at stake as they choose a place to work at.

Educators can certainly be part of the process of making sure this all happens.

Game Design Tech Tree, version 0.1 (beta)

2010-03-31T19:45:00.004-04:00

I put this together today and thought I'd share. I've attempted to list every major skill or task that falls under the broad field of "game design." I then tried to create a kind of progression, based on which skills are desired prerequisites before learning or performing others.

This is very much a work in progress (I haven't even added any icons yet), so your comments are welcome. Click on the image for a large version.

Since this is mostly a graphical version of notes to myself, some explanations might be required. I'm not sure how much is obvious to the casual observer, however, so rather than write a lengthy essay explaining every last detail, I'll simply answer any questions you have in the comments here. Enjoy!

Stop saying "They Don't Teach You This In School"!

2010-03-29T10:20:00.003-04:00

Twice in the past week I've run into a person that said as part of their presentation, something like "this is the stuff they don't teach you in school." In both cases, this was part of a presentation given at a school. Does anyone else see the irony here?

Okay, in some cases a person is saying this and they're not at a school. But you know what? If that person is saying anything that's really useful, before too long educators are going to notice, and we'll incorporate it into our curricula, and now it will be something taught in school. The very pronouncement that something "isn't taught in school" is self-defeating.

If it were just a matter of technical details, I'd leave it at that, but there is something more insidious going on here. When someone makes this kind of statement, the implication is that there are important things you don't learn in a traditional classroom setting. This may be true, but why? The primary reason is that you get out of your education what you put in, and that some things only come with experience, so students should stop waiting for their professors to spoon-feed them everything they need, and go out there and make learning a passion, and learn this stuff on their own.

However, all too often I think students take away an entirely different message: school is useless, your teachers are lying to you, the only real thing that matters is getting a "piece of paper," feel free to ignore all of your course content, what it takes to succeed is not hard work but rather knowing a few key "secrets" that take no effort. This attitude is incredibly damaging, especially to professors like me who are bringing their own real-world experience into the classroom setting and actually teaching the things that students aren't supposed to learn "in school."

Game Jams in the Classroom

2010-03-11T11:17:00.003-05:00

Just talked at GDC yesterday for a whole five minutes, on applying Global Game Jam in the classroom in five non-obvious ways (you know, other than "get students to participate"). I think I was talking too fast for anyone to actually take notes, so here is the gist:

1. Have students read post-mortems and do a cumulative analysis.

The "post-mortem" is a tradition in the game industry: after a project is released, a reflection on what went right and what went wrong in the process (or as I put it: "figuring out why your game sucked as badly as it did"). You can find these on Gamasutra and in Game Developer magazine, and you can even see student post-mortems on Game Career Guide. And to start with, reading these is valuable for students so that they can see the patterns and get a feel for the most common pitfalls and dangers of game development.

Beyond this, though, it's instructive to have students search for Game Jam post-mortems (these are unofficial and tend to be on individual participants' blogs, so you have to do some digging to find them). The interesting thing is that a lot of themes in industry post-mortems on 5-year AAA projects also appear in Game Jam post-mortems (scope control, pipeline problems, engine difficulties, team communication, etc.). So a lot of the same lessons apply on how to develop a game, whether the game takes 2 days or 10 years.

2. Game Analysis

I teach a class called "Game Criticism and Analysis" (sort of like art criticism or film criticism, but with games). The goal is to be able to play games and analyze them in a way that's a little more sophisticated than "it's good" or "it sucks."

Normally, analyzing a full game is really hard in a class, because many games are very long to play ("80+ hours of gameplay!" is a common marketing tactic), and even shorter games are still 8 to 10 hours, which is hard to justify if you want students to analyze a new game each week.

Game jam games offer a solution. Because they are made in a short period of time, they tend to play quickly and have relatively simple systems, lending them to play in class or as homework without taking too much time.

3. Minimum bar for student projects

For "capstone" and other project-based courses where students work individually or on teams to make complete games over an academic term (or several), game jam games provide a realistic, achievable yardstick to measure project quality. I mean, these games were made in 2 days, so your students should be able to do at least as well with 15 weeks.

The best, most clever Game Jam games can be used as a source of inspiration for students, that they should be able to do better with so much more time. They can be used as a grading rubric, letting students know the quality level you expect (and informing the teacher about this as well).

4. Achievements

We tried some new things at Global Game Jam this year, among them Xbox-Live style "Achievements": totally optional extra challenges to allow experienced developers to really push their boundaries. It allowed people to seek their own level of challenge and comfort.

I see no reason similar things can't be implemented in most class assignments. (We already offer "extra credit" but "Achievement Unlocked" sounds so much more fun.) You can offer extra points, or you can simply make it available for the purpose of bragging rights.

5. Fix a broken game

As you might imagine, with only 48 hours, some games don't actually work. Maybe the team overscoped and had to make drastic cuts at the end. Or maybe the programmer stayed up a little too late and wrote some terribly insane code at 3am and now the entire thing is a mess. The whole project team would like nothing better than to sweep the whole thing under the rug and pretend it never happened (and hopefully take away some life lessons about how to not make games).

Additionally, there is often a disconnect between classes (where students typically start with a blank slate and write a complete, simple program from scratch) and industry (where you are almost always working with someone else's pre-written code, not even counting the use of game engines).

Luckily, one of the rules for Global Game Jam is that everyone (in theory at least) has to submit their complete game (including source code)... working or not. This suggests an interesting assignment: find a game that has the source code posted that doesn't actually run, and assign a programming team to fix it, while staying as close as possible to the original design intent.

Your students will hate you. They will complain that the people writing this code were horrible programmers. They will complain that the code is a mess, and that they just want to rewrite it all from scratch. They will probably use a lot more profanity than you are used to hearing from them. In other words... they will start to sound a lot more like professional game programmers :-)

Games at Conferences

2010-03-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

As I'm going to GDC next week, it occurs to me that one of the things I'm known for in my small circle of colleagues is that I'm the guy who brings the board games. Video game developers generally like to play board games, and I happen to have a sizeable collection, so this is a win-win.

Playing games at conferences is different from playing them at, say, a local game club. The social dynamics, physical setting, and time availability are constraints on the kinds of games that people are most likely to enjoy. Let us take GDC as an example. Here are some considerations:

I'm flying in, so I have limited space in my baggage (especially if I want to leave any room to take back some swag). This favors games that are small and portable -- card games, but even some board games that come in big boxes if I can remove the bits from the box, put them in plastic bags, and have them take up a lot less space.
Most venues are noisy, so it's better if games are either well-known (I don't have to explain the rules) or simple (I can explain the rules quickly without blowing out my voice). This also unfortunately reduces the value of games where players have to speak a lot (e.g. those games that focus on trading, diplomacy, or negotiation mechanics).
GDC is crowded, and every ten seconds one of the people at the table is going to turn around, see an old friend, and have to go off and say 'hi'. Games that are short (like, five minutes or less) are good here, as are those rare games that allow free entry and exit of players without screwing up everyone else. Ironically, games that have lots of player downtime can work well here: it lets players socialize with non-players when it's not their turn.
Table space is plentiful at the conference, but not so much at parties. Some board games that use a lot of space are fine at breakfast, but I also need to bring a few games that are a little more compact for the nightlife. (Also, most nighttime activities involve drinks... so waterproof games are a plus, as are games that can be played competently while drunk!)
Number of players is a consideration. Games that only support 2 or 4 players, or those that work best with a specific number, are not as good as those with wide ranges (2 to 8 players). You never know exactly how many people you'll have.
Avoid games with play times more than 30 or 45 minutes. Someone will inevitably have to go to a session, or get called away on business.
Games that have some kind of visual "wow" factor are nice, because they act as an attention-grabber for anyone walking past. This gives everyone at the table the opportunity to network, if only by answering the question "oh, what is that game?" over and over (hey, any excuse to get a business card). Note that board games with all the bits crammed into a plastic bag aren't so appealing at the table; this year I'll experiment with printing out a sheet with the game box artwork to stick in the bag, to make it look nicer.
Know the audience. Three games in particular seem to be loved by a disproportionate number of game developers I know: Family Business (which I never have to bring because someone else inevitably does), Pandemic (everyone seems to love it but no one owns it, making it an obvious choice for me to cart along), and Dominion (sadly disqualified because it doesn't travel well, though I may attempt to stuff the basic set into an old box I used to use for Magic cards).
Game developers (particularly designers) have discriminating tastes, so I try to bring games that showcase some kind of unique mechanic. If I can introduce other designers to new mechanics, this buys me street cred :-)

Given all of this, what games will I bring this year? I won't know for sure until I pack, but here are some likely candidates:

Incan Gold. Supports 3-8 players, has a small game box, the rules are ridiculously simple but still engaging. Plays in five rounds, with each round taking only a couple minutes, and players can theoretically leave in between rounds without screwing up the other players.
Pandemic. With the expansion, supports 2-5 players. Plays in about 45 minutes, pushing the upper limit for a game at breakfast, but this game sets the gold standard for pure-coop play in a board game... something that is notoriously hard to do.
Hey! That's My Fish!. Serves 2-4. Small box. The rules can be explained in less than a minute, and play lasts for about five minutes. Delightful experience in such a short time, and it has these ridiculously cute penguin pieces.
Notre Dame. For 3-5 players, takes about 45 minutes, and is about as complex and strategic as I dare to bring. That said, it has some absolutely brilliant mechanics, and is obscure enough that a lot of people still haven't played it yet. The box it comes in is large, but it's mostly empty space, so it collapses nicely.
Brawl. This real-time card game takes about a minute to explain and another minute to play. Theoretically supports multiplayer, but works best with 2. That said, the games are so fast that this makes a good filler if you happen to only have one other person and you're both waiting for some other people to show up. Comes as a set of small decks of cards, so it's very portable.
Rock!. Another real-time card game, also works with 2 (although I learned a nifty 3-player and 4-player variant from the publisher last summer). In an elegant way, demonstrates an important design principle: time pressure makes you stupid. It's just a single deck of cards, and even comes in a metal tin to protect the cards.

Other conferences have different criteria. GDX, for example, is a more relaxed atmosphere where you can actually congregate for a few hours at a time. So the games I bring there is different.

Project Horseshoe

2010-01-21T19:46:00.000-05:00

So, I went to Project Horseshoe this year, not knowing exactly what to expect, but hearing from survivors of earlier years that it was awesome. I was not disappointed, and now I understand what it is all about.

The format is highly similar to a game jam. The first night, we collect in one place and have introductions and casual conversation. Bright and early the next morning, we brainstorm a bunch of potential projects to work on, and then aggregate around a few that are of passionate interest. Then we spend the rest of that day and most of the next day working on our projects. At the end of the second day, we present our results to the entire group. I've praised game jams before, so if you like that kind of "get lots of amazing stuff done in a very short period of time" you'll understand the appeal of an event like this.

There are two key differences between PH and a game jam. The most obvious is that in PH we are not making video games from scratch, but rather brainstorming the solutions to difficult problems facing the game industry (for example, my group worked on how to build ethical decision-making into games, in a way that is more sophisticated than a choice between pure-good and pure-evil). So it is more of a "game design jam" than a "game jam."

The second difference is the quality of people. PH is invite-only. This is similar to the difference between the Global Game Jam (open to all) and the Indie Game Jam (invite-only among a small circle of professional game devs). Both methods can work well, either a focus on quantity or quality... as long as the "quantity" method includes some way for the great stuff to bubble up to the top. PH is in the latter camp.

All reports (from this year and previous years) can be found here.

Relevance to teaching:

Some reports may be directly relevant to student projects. For example, in one class this quarter, I see one student proposing a game with ethical decision-making and three students writing proposals for Facebook games, both of which are topics covered this year.
In a course on the game industry, game design, or game criticism/analysis, one possible assignment could be to read a report of the student's choosing and present it to the class -- the same way other courses might do the same with reading and presenting a current research paper or foundational article from the field.

Escapist article

2009-12-17T16:54:00.002-05:00

My debut as an Escapist columnist was just posted. It amazes me that I'm at a point where I can just send emails to some well-known game developers asking interview questions, and they actually respond. I'm still not sure how this happened.

For students, I'd also recommend reading the editor's note to this issue. It describes a little of the culture of game development, and is a reminder that this is not just an industry of gamers, but of human beings. Sometimes as a rabid game fan it is easy to lose sight of that.

One interesting thing I just realized is that you might or might not be able to ask the same question ("what games do you keep playing obsessively?") of teachers. Yes, many game development teachers are rabid gamers... but I've run into more than a few that have no personal interest in games. But I don't think I've ever met a game designer who didn't love games. It's strange, the differences between the two worlds.

Now, I just have to decide whether The Escapist counts as a peer-reviewed publication for purposes of my CV... probably not.

Culture Shock: the role of policy

2009-11-18T23:23:00.002-05:00

In academia, there is less of a team spirit than there is in the game industry. Probably this is because there is less of a threat of, say, an entire department getting laid off because their collective product didn't sell enough units at retail. This difference has many manifestations.

One difference is in how closely people follow written policies.

In industry, while most workplaces do have some kind of Employee Manual with a list of policies, these are usually seen more as guidelines (except in the obvious cases where there would be legal repercussions if the policies are ignored). Getting an exception to, say, a sick leave policy is a matter of talking to your boss about it and having a good reason, especially if that reason ultimately benefits the team and the game.

In the academic world, policy seems a lot stricter. Asking for an exception is essentially asking your boss to go through some kind of appeals or justification process on your behalf. It is asking for more work, in a world where everyone already has quite enough work on their plate, thank you. So it is far more likely to meet a stone wall in this case. You are more likely to see bosses and administrators hiding behind official policy rather than explaining it or working around it, because following the rules is the path of least resistance, and there isn't much personal reward to putting in the extra effort.

For my peers in industry considering academia, this is one of those annoying things you can expect to run into. Ultimately, it means you have to choose your battles carefully, because you won't have enough time to fight over every silly little thing (at least, not if you expect to get all your work done).

Obviously, not all schools are this bureaucratic, and not all game companies are this relaxed. I'm talking general trends here, based on my experience. As usual.

Textbook Review: The Art of Game Design

2009-10-21T22:44:00.003-04:00

It's been awhile since I did one of these, mostly because I've been busy with other things aside from reading. I'm glad to be looking at textbooks again, because quite a few interesting ones have surfaced in the past year or two. And so today I examine:

"The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" (Jesse Schell)

Now, this book came out about the same time that mine did, and it managed to steal the spotlight, so I really wanted to hate it. But it really is a solid book, and fully deserves the praise it has been receiving.

The information is solid, as I would expect it to be. Game design is a broad field, and Jesse has an even broader skill set, allowing him to effectively write about game design... but also about a variety of other fields that game design can (and should) draw from. This on its own makes the book stand out; many books that are supposedly on game design do not teach the first thing of it, so it is nice to read from someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

The writing is very conversational and even intimate in tone. Only Jesse could have written this, and his voice is very clear in the writing to anyone who has met him. There are no practice problems or quizzes, making it feel more like a guided tour than a stuffy textbook. I found it easy to start reading, easy to keep reading, and very accessible throughout.

Perhaps the best part, the part that I am likely to steal for my own classes, is the organization of the book. Each chapter introduces one aspect of game design, such as story, game worlds, game mechanics, game balance, or the iterative process. The topic is explored in depth, and connected to other topics. Throughout the book, a concept map is built piece by piece, chapter by chapter.

The book is comprehensive, covering not just the core concepts of game design but also everything immediately surrounding it: interfacing with the rest of the development team, dealing with companies and funding and profit-making, player communities, and so on. While a "pure" game design course might eschew these kinds of peripheral topics, I find their inclusion necessary as a way to prepare students for the realities of the industry: you are not going to be creating your own games from whole cloth, you will be designing other people's games according to their own constraints, so get used to dealing with that on multiple levels.

Embedded within each chapter are a series of "lenses" as alluded to by the subtitle. Each lens is one way to evaluate a game-in-progress, and includes one or more direct questions to ask of the current iteration. Many of the lenses directly reference one another (or sets of lenses are grouped together in the text), making something of a concept map between them as well.

If the book has any weakness as a course textbook, it is that it does not give exercises or other tasks that could be assigned as homework, so the teacher will need to provide that on their own. Additionally, the book seems to naturally assume that the reader is already working on their own game idea; it therefore does not provide any direct call to action for readers (particularly students) who may not know where to begin if they have not already started. In this, it actually makes a great companion to my book (which is practically nothing but a series of constraints that can be used to start a game project).

Students: If this textbook is not required reading in your game design courses (or especially if you do not have any game design courses), take some initiative and go read it yourself. Its combined breadth and depth make it an ideal starting point to show you all practical areas of game design and (most importantly) to get you thinking like a designer. Think of it as a foundation, upon which everything else can be built.

Instructors: This book is perfect for an intro game design course. You could cover a selection of topics that are of interest to you (or that best fit your curriculum), or try to cover all of the topics briefly just to give some exposure (as you might in a survey course). Consider having students hang onto this text so that some parts can be referenced in higher-level design courses.

Also, if you are just planning out your first game design course, you could do worse than following this book (addressing each chapter in the order it's presented) as a rough syllabus.

Professionals: A lot of the information here might seem basic if you are an experienced designer. That said, we all have our weaknesses -- a technical designer might not be great at building worlds, while not all story writers are proficient at game balance -- and this provides an accessible way to get at least a minimum baseline of understanding of those other parts of design that are so mysterious to you. The most useful part will probably be the lenses themselves (of which you can purchase a separate deck of cards, one lens per card, as a quick-reference) as they provide an easy way to objectively examine the game you are currently working on.

Lessons from SIEGE

2009-10-15T15:55:00.002-04:00

For those of you waiting patiently, I am now back, and can hopefully get back to a quasi-regular posting schedule. This summer's online course took pretty much all my attention, and I am now getting caught up.

(For those of you working at game companies or academic institutions, I'm going to teach another free class next year, and am looking for sponsors. If you want to broadcast your message worldwide to people interested in learning game design, email me: my address is ai864, and it's a yahoo.com account.)

I returned just last week from SIEGE 2009, a small conference in Atlanta. Even though it is largely focused on game development in Georgia and the surrounding region, for some reason they like to bring me down there. I spoke on a panel about experimental games (short version: find them, play them, make them) and ran two game design workshops. Here are my takeaways from the conference:

Game Writing

Story/dialogue/creative writing is one of my weak points as a designer, so when people who know about this stuff are speaking, I pay attention. This session was given by Bill Bridges, Nathan Knaack, and Joe Carriker.

Create a backstory document for internal use only. The idea, I assume, is that you should know enough about your world that (especially if you use multiple writers) you can avoid contradictions and continuity problems. This was referred to as the "writing equivalent of concept art."
The hardest part of game writing is making it succinct, because game writers instinctively want to write long walls of text (which leads to the "TLDR effect").
Separate the gameplay-relevant text from the flavor text (flavor text is, by definition, that text which is not useful for gameplay and is purely for the enjoyment of players who want to know more about the story world). A good example of this was given in World of Warcraft, where the text for a quest includes a short gameplay synopsis ("kill 5 rats") alongside a large block of flavor text (telling you why you're supposed to care about killing 5 rats).
Someone asked, why not include some gameplay text inside the flavor text, as a way of giving a gameplay bonus to those players who read the story? Great answer: if you do this, you are giving a gameplay advantage to precisely those players who don't want it! The players who care about getting more plusses on their equipment are the ones that ignore your story because it slows down their power-leveling, and if you force them to read your elaborate story just for an extra +1 they will resent you for it. (The roleplayers who just want to immerse themselves in the story, meanwhile, are more concerned with reading the story then optimizing their stats.)
Corollary: one positive trend in game writing these days is to try to embed the story in such a way that it is optional -- players who care about it can spend all the time they want reading it, but it should not get in the way of players who just want your story writers to shut up and get on with the game already. (Ideal example: the audio tapes in Bioshock.)
When writing dialogue for characters, give each character a unique voice. By giving different accents and verbal mannerisms, it's an easy way to give them more personality, while also making it easier for the player to tell the NPCs apart.
Writing for MMOs is a huge challenge, above writing for most other kinds of games. Why? Because story is about change, and in MMOs there is not a great deal of change. Any game writing in MMOs has to work around this somehow.

Player-Centric Design

The actual name of this talk was "Getting the Human in the Game" and it was about never forgetting that you're designing your game for actual players, not robots. What followed was a blast of quick game design tidbits from designers Andrew Greenberg, Danny Miller, Michelle Menard, and Harrison Pink.

Many games follow the classic Hero's Journey quite well, until you get to the end, where the hero is supposed to return with the Prize and then share it with the rest of society to make a better world. This last bit is an important part of the classic story structure, and most games leave it out entirely. One major exception: MMO Raids, where a group of heroes follow this journey and return with epic loot that they can all share.
One other challenge to the classic Hero's Journey: most hero stories center around a single heroic figure, but in games we are moving towards a collaborative set of heroes rather than a single central hero (think Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead). This is not unheard of in classic hero stories either (Jason and the Argonauts has an all-star cast of heroes, it's not just about Jason) but this is something that contemporary game writers should be aware of when crafting their stories.
Interesting potential for exploration in game design: there are six primal emotions (fear, disgust, joy, sadness, surprise, anger). Instead of saying "I'm going to create a game that causes a particular emotional response in the player," start the other way around: find existing game moments that produce your desired emotions, then extrapolate to figure out what mechanics can cause those emotions.
When trying to force an emotional response in the player (especially towards an NPC or other object in the game world), do not assume players will inherently know that, say, dogs are scary or that they should love butterflies or whatever. Show them through NPC dialogue or behavior modeling that this is how things are in your world. For example, if you want the player to find a certain flower beautiful, have an NPC remark on how pretty that flower is. (I think a great example of this is the Weighted Companion Cube in Portal, where players can become emotionally attached to a crate, simply because this psychotic disembodied voice tells them to.)
Numerical score is meaningless nowadays. You scored 10,500 points -- is that good or bad? How would you know? An alternative is low-dimensional scoring (say, a score of 1 to 10). There is a temptation to make scoring complicated for the purposes of game balance, and feel free to do this, but it is important to make the final score less granular so that the player can have some idea of how good they really did. Examples: ranks or letter grades; achievements and badges; or giving some kind of context ("your score is better than 80% of other players").
We think little kids are dumb, but they are actually smarter than we are much of the time. When designing for kids, we tend to lead by the hand to make sure they don't lose... but the end result is that they don't feel a sense of accomplishment. Alternative: create safe spaces for kids to fail.

Better Business Models

Jason Della Rocca gave a wonderful keynote entitled "10 things that don't suck about the industry." There were a number of points he made, but the most relevant takeaways I saw were from finding new business models beyond the current AAA publisher / third-party developer model.

Current typical business model: spend lots of money (in the millions), then stop development and release your game, then make money (hopefully more than you spent). This sucks -- you get no feedback during development, so the best you can do is cross your fingers and hope. Failures are expensive and cannot be undone, leading to the excessive risk-aversion that we all love to whine about.
Here's a better alternative, which we are already seeing with many social network games: spend a small amount of money, then do a "soft" beta launch and start making money much earlier. At this point you can then manage your income against your development expenses in realtime. Ideally, have several games in development at once, and you can shift dev resources from the worst-performing to best-performing games.
Even better: we are moving towards a better understanding of how to collect and make use of metrics in games. Combine that with fast releases, and we can use metrics to figure out what games are and aren't making money, and why. This can greatly reduce the risk of development, allowing developers to take greater creative risks while still reducing the cost of failure.

Soundbytes from Protospiel and SIGGRAPH

2009-08-06T14:57:00.002-04:00

Protospiel is an annual gathering of non-digital game designers who come together to playtest their current works in progress. This is not a typical conference -- there are no sessions, lectures, or keynote speakers. It is all playtesting and analysis from start to end.

That said, I picked up a few things. In no particular order:

Resource: http://www.eaieducation.com/ - a website where you can order colored stackables, plastic cubes, and other useful game prototyping bits for relatively cheap.
Ever since the success of the Pandemic board game, a lot of people have been experimenting with pure cooperative games (I saw a number of co-op games at Protospiel, in addition to the ones coming out on the market already). One problem with the entire genre is when you have a situation with one expert player working with a group of novices. In this case, the expert dominates the game: they can either sit down and shut up and let everyone else flounder about (and now the expert is bored), or they can take charge and direct everything (and now everyone else is bored). They can offer hints while still letting everyone else retain their autonomy, but overall the game relies on the expert player to keep things fun (rather than the gameplay itself being inherently fun). This is a problem that arises from games that are purely cooperative and also offer complete information sharing between players. One possible solution is to build "information walls" between players so that a single player doesn't have the info to direct everyone else... but then this pushes players towards playing individually rather than as a coordinated team, and the whole point of being "cooperative" is lost. One interesting solution I'm seeing is to make the play real-time, so that the expert player just doesn't have the time to coordinate everything; this is how co-op video games work (one player can't simultaneously work four keyboards and mice), and there's no reason it can't work with board games... in theory.
Games for girls: an important aspect here is the social dynamics between players. One designer did research on this by actually going to a mall, sitting on a bench outside a trendy store, and observing groups of shoppers. I thought this was a rather clever way to do research on a target audience, and could probably have applications with other audiences.
Resource: A lot of designers have a game from Amigo called Rage. This is not because Rage is all that great a game. It is because it is a card game with seven suits, numbered 1 to 15 in each suit, along with several Joker-like suitless cards... meaning that you can use some subset of a Rage deck to prototype just about any card game you can imagine.

From a purely cultural standpoint, I noticed some interesting things about board game designers when they get in large enough groups for culture to emerge:

You can tell which hotel rooms are populated by board game designers, because they all have the "do not disturb" sign hanging on the door at all times, even when they're not there. Why? Because they have learned through experience that hotel cleaning staff will often mistake their prototype game bits (torn pieces of paper, index cards and cardboard, etc.) for trash, and throw them away... or, almost as bad, to "helpfully" organize them so that you can't find anything. One game company employee reported that they no longer outsource the cleaning of their office, after one time when a janitor threw away a bag with prototype bits and a playtest notebook (this would be the non-digital equivalent of having your IT guy accidentally delete your entire code base on the server, along with all backups.)
There are some differences in jargon between board game and video game designers. "Analysis paralysis" (where a player spends too long thinking about their turn, stalling the game) happens frequently enough in board games that it is simply referred to by its initials, as in "this game is really prone to AP, you should add a sand timer." In video games, AP means Associate Producer, which is a bit different.
Meanwhile, a lot of board game designers have not been exposed to video game development at all. In a relatively large group discussion, someone was afraid of making too many differently-shaped custom pieces, and I suggested using "palette-swapping" -- that is, use a small number of shapes, and color them differently. No one had ever heard of the term before. This would not happen in a gathering of video game devs.

SIGGRAPH (I'm not sure why, but I always see people capitalize it like they're shouting it) is a conference on computer graphics, blending both the artistic and technical. At first I felt a bit out of place as a game designer (we don't normally work with graphics directly), but I found a lot of kindred spirits that are either teachers or game designers, and I wrote down a bunch of notes... again, in no particular order.

Nowadays, some game design students are hired in large companies as Associate Producers and are given some basic production and design tasks to see what they can do. If they're really good at one or the other, they can transition into a role that fits their skills. If they suck at both, they can just get fired without too much pain.
For educational games, align the learning goal with the core game activity / mechanics; use the peer network as a learning environment; make sure that increasing relevant skills outside of the game translates to better performance within the game. (In this case, "gaming the system" or using a "walkthrough" or "FAQ" -- normally considered cheating -- is actually a good thing... as long as doing so allows the student to meet learning outcomes.)
There is natural tension between wanting to give the player complete agency, and wanting to give a controlled, focused (if "on rails") experience. Interesting compromise: use psychological principles (such as reciprocity, scarcity, appeal to authority, etc.) to manipulate the player towards the game's goals. The player maintains their sense of agency, while still doing what the designer wants them to.
Consumer psychology research is useful when making persuasive games, since marketing to consumers is essentially persuasion.
In cooperative games, think of communication as the core mechanic. If passing information to your fellow players has an in-game cost, that makes things interesting (and also solves the "expert player" problem identified earlier).
I used to assume that a game with intentionally incomplete mechanics -- that is, games where the rules MUST be interpreted or invented by players and cannot be 100% standardized -- could not be faithfully represented as video games. After all, video games require programming code, and programs can only follow instructions, not make value judgments or rules interpretations. But I missed something. You can do this in a limited sense, by putting certain parts of the game under manual player control. As an example, there used to be a client called Apprentice that let you play Magic: the Gathering online with your friends. This program didn't implement any of the rules of the game at all; it just let you click and drag cards and tokens around a virtual game board, and displayed your cards to your opponent. It was up to the players themselves to actually play the game by the rules, without using the computer as a rules mediator. A similar thing could be done for other games, such as tabletop RPGs (or games where one of the rules is essentially "the players decide on a rule").
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have offered "Merit Badges" as a reward system since, like, forever. It only took the video game industry about 35 years to figure out how compelling this was. What else can we learn from the systemic psychological indoctrination of kids, in terms of how to use that to make better games? :-)
Resource: Future Pinball is a free-to-download pinball simulator that allows players to construct their own tables out of parts, with mostly click-and-drag functionality and minimal scripting (no hardcore programming). This offers some great opportunities for game design students. For one thing, very few 18-year-olds today are intimately familiar with Pinball, so it is a level playing field. Pinball table layout is highly constrained (by both space and availability of parts), preventing projects from having scope that grows out of control. Pinball table design uses the same skills as any other level design. By tying a "create a pinball table" assignment to an intellectual property (such as a recent popular movie or TV show), students can be challenged to take an existing narrative and translate it across media... a good skill to have, and a challenging one in the case of Pinball where the player actions are highly non-linear and unscripted (and unlike video games, it's hard to put the player "on rails" in Pinball).
One difficulty with making games with sexual content is that sex is extremely personal and different for everyone. Interestingly, I think the same is true of spirituality; if someone discovers how to make a compelling game that can bring a player closer to God, the same techniques could probably be used to make a serious game about sex. Is that ironic?
Will Wright was quoted as not liking the term "non-digital" to describe board games and card games and the like. He prefers "matter-based" games. I am amused.
As a teacher, convincing students to attend local industry functions (such as IGDA meetings) can be a challenge. Some students do not see the value, and approach this as "more gross-icky-disgusting-learning outside of school, and not even for a grade, so why spend my free time with that". Others see the value but are intimidated, and don't want to do anything embarrassing in front of the very people who may want to hire them later, so they just don't show out of fear. Professors may want to think of ways to work around this. Or, we could take the approach that the students that don't show are the ones that wouldn't make it in industry anyway, so it provides a useful selection/filtering process.
When analyzing games as an art form, where is the art? It can be found in many places: the visuals (obviously)... although there may be a distinction between "game art" and "art-games"; the game mechanics to the extent that they lead to play that expresses meaning; player activity which can be artistic, but raises the problem (expressed by Roger Ebert) of authorship -- if art requires an artist, is the artist the game designer or the player? ; the game environments, as an analogy to designing the stage as opposed to writing a play; the game code itself, to the extend that it enables everything else, and also that it can push the boundaries of the technology (consider the parallel between coding on a very constrained platform like Atari 2600, versus writing a constrained poem like a Haiku).
Currently, a lot of traditional museums are confused with how to frame interactive exhibits. Actually letting visitors touch the art is new to them and makes many of them nervous. As more artists are creating interactive works, and as more museum curators are considering ways to make the entire museum-going experience more interactive (even "game-like"), this problem is being attacked from both ends and will probably become a non-issue within our lifetimes.
Aristotle's three-Act structure doesn't translate well to games, because Acts 1 and 3 essentially map to non-interactive cut-scenes. Almost the entire game is Act 2. (However, if you use the three-Act structure on a micro level to design quests, NPC plot arcs, individual levels, and so on, it can lead to a more robust larger story.)
Game writing tips: don't write about what the main character does, but what they will experience (remember, the player is in control of what the main character does). Think of game fiction as told through objectives and rewards. Don't tell the story through the main character; instead, write the story through the NPCs and their own points of view.
Use the game space to create memorable moments.

Twitter as Education Platform

2009-07-17T20:42:00.002-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, something magical happened. A game design discussion spontaneously broke out on Twitter. The original topic of discussion was the role of narrative in games, but eventually it extended to several other topics. Some really top-tier designers were taking part in the discussions, including David Jaffe, Clint Hocking, Damion Schubert, John Romero, Harvey Smith, Brenda Brathwaite, and about a dozen others whose names you should know if you are at all interested in this industry.

The main conversation continued until past midnight. Pearls of game design brilliance dropped constantly, each in 140 characters or less. It was amazing to see. As of right now, there is still some discussion happening. There was talk of formalizing this and turning it into a regular thing, but I think the fact that it just randomly happened is part of what made it special.

Search for the tag #gamedesign on Twitter to see the whole thing, unreadable though it may be in linear format.

Why is this relevant to teaching game design? Because most practicing designers do not have the time to write a textbook, yet we teach from textbooks. Some designers have blogs, but the best we can do is reference specific entries from the past, and even then it is usually a single designer's opinion (if we're lucky, a few other designers will have a discussion in the comments on the blog). There are GDC roundtables, which are usually not audio or video recorded. There are closed-to-the-public email discussion groups, which do filter out slowly but cannot be followed in real time. But this Twitter thing -- it happened in a very public place, and just kind of emerged as an ongoing conversation. That is how developers spread information, by talking to one another and letting their experience and wisdom spread virally among the community.

I don't know if we'll see this happen again, but those rare times when it does are worth reading.

Report from Game Education Summit

2009-06-20T09:32:00.002-04:00

I'm just catching up from the excellent Game Education Summit earlier this week. Here are my notes:

Donald Marinelli, keynote:

Much of today's educational system is obsolete. Summer vacation exists to let young people go home and help their families with farm chores. How many K-12 students do you know that are planting wheat right now?
If you are building a game for a class, build it for someone. Give it a purpose.
ETC's "secret sauce" is that they let students teach each other.

Terrence Masson, on building Northeastern University's curriculum:

Interesting way to structure a Capstone course with 10 people: first day people give their project pitches (most students pitch several alternative projects). Second day, students narrow the pitch list down to the two projects that the class will work on; students choose their teams (split into two teams of 5); each team assigns roles and chooses their project lead. Essentially, the students drive everything.
Another interesting thing about this program is the requirement of two non-adjacent semesters in internships/co-ops. The benefit is that students keep the faculty honest: "What do you mean we don't have Zbrush on campus? That's what everyone is using now!"
Note to prospective students: at this particular institution, the program is called "game design" but it is actually "game development". This points to the importance of schools and industry using a unified set of terminology.

Jessica Hammer, on how to teach creativity:

First, you have to define what "creativity" is, because it is an overloaded term, and there are different kinds of creativity. She defined it as "appropriate novelty" -- something that is new, but within a given context/domain. (If you ask students to design a game and they write an essay instead, and try to define an essay as an innovative new type of linear-narrative game, this is not what we are looking for.)
Creativity happens within a context or domain (i.e. within a set of constraints). There is a virtuous cycle within a field, where the domain influences individuals; the individuals produce creative work within the domain; and the gatekeepers who see this work then influence and redefine the boundaries of the domain to compensate. In the case of teachers, the classroom is the domain.
One problem in practice is that we often measure creativity after the fact: we look at the final product and decide if it is creative. Unfortunately, this tells us nothing about the process used to create it... and if we want to teach creativity, we want to teach the process!
There are three aspects to the creative process that students need to understand: the generation of novel ideas, the ability to decide what ideas to pursue (since ideas are a dime a dozen, once you learn how to generate them), and the motivation to follow through on your chosen idea and do the work to turn it into a final product. The class should focus on these.

Jessica's hints for course design:

Begin with outcomes. "The goal of a course is not to deliver content, but to transform your students."
Consider the length and pacing of the class. If there is not enough time to generate ideas, fail many times, and still finish, students will take fewer creative risks.
"Personal attention is valuable currency." Keep class sizes small when possible. Group work can enable larger class sizes by having you deal with a small number of groups rather than a large number of individuals.
Recruitment is rarely thought about, but is important. The more diverse your class (or, um, game studio), the more creative the ideas you're likely to see. When approached by a female and/or minority student, be supportive and ask if they have friends who would also be interested in taking your class. Also, consider the accessibility of your classes: if students can choose between written or verbal assignments, you will see higher enrollment among those for whom English is a second language.
Use a lot of class time on playtesting and peer review. Professor should model appropriate feedback, to show what it looks like.
Encourage uncertainty, in projects, classes and life. "Your game design education does not end when you leave this class. It has just started."
Don't just have students solve problems that are handed to them, because this is not how real life works. Have them create and seek out their own problems to solve.
There is a negative relationship between the time and emotional investment in a project, and willingness to take risks. In the middle of larger projects, consider giving smaller-scale "lightning round" design challenges that encourage creative risk-taking -- for example, email students with constraints of a challenge at noon one day, and they have 24 hours to post a short concept in an online discussion group. These are not a major component of the course grade; they are a chance for students to show off. Examples: "Design a game to be played in the waiting room of an ICU while you're waiting to see if a loved one lives or dies." / "Design a game for NASA that can keep astronauts alert and interested on a 3-year mission to Mars." / "Design a game for Obama's cabinet to help improve their effectiveness as a team."
How do you assess creativity? Note that you get what you measure; students will game any system. If you want to reward risk, you have to give grading opportunities for it. Jessica splits the final project grade into three equal parts: the game itself (the final result of the process), the theory (students write a companion paper that shows the connections between the theory learned in class and its expression in their game), and the process (students submit a "process paper" that includes everything that was part of the project but not visible in the final form: raw data, early playtest results, early versions of the game, mechanics that were tried and abandoned... whatever the student wants the instructor to see).
Divide larger projects into many feedback cycles / milestones. Iteration is part of the creative process, and class projects should reflect that.
The nature of instructor feedback is important. If you just give a grade, that carries very little information. Extensive written feedback is much better, but can take a lot of time; to manage this, favor group projects or smaller numbers of submitted projects per-person.
As the instructor, you are a strong influence on the culture of the classroom. You want students to feel comfortable taking risks, both in their projects and by raising their hand to make suggestions/comments in class. How you react when students say something "stupid" has a huge impact. Suggestion: draw from the "Yes, and..." technique of improvisational theater -- accept everything in class, refuse to shut down an idea or say that it's wrong, and instead challenge yourself to find the nugget of truth in there.
Give students a sense of mission. People are more creative under stress when they believe in the importance of the final project. Because of this, fewer projects (reduction of workload) can paradoxically lead to students spending more time and doing more work... as long as the projects they have are the right ones.
Self-efficacy is important: students must believe they can perform well in the class. Corollary: we as teachers must believe in our students. Research has shown that a teacher's belief in a student's ability to perform is often self-fulfilling.
Praise students not only for their projects, but also for exhibiting personal qualities that we want them to continue: hard work, persistence, etc.

Walter Rotenberry (Wake Tech), on the challenges faced by Community Colleges:

The ideal case for a Community College is that you are based in a "hub" of the game industry, so that your graduates have immediate local employment and internship opportunities. What if there are no game companies in a 100-mile radius?
An alternative: focus on entrepreneurship. Require your students to take classes in business, enough that they would be comfortable building their own startups. Give students the tools to start their own local studios.
Wake Tech's approach to a two-year program is interesting: cover a little bit of everything (at least one or two courses from programming, design, art, production, audio, business, game studies, etc.) to give a well-rounded background. This provides a foundation for transfer to any four-year school. I thought this was an interesting approach -- in my experience, usually with only two years to work with, Community Colleges focus on art or programming. I'm not sure that one approach is "better" than the other, but I can see the use of both.
Encourage students to take courses in other relevant areas and departments: theater/drama, history, storytelling, etc. - the bonus is that in many cases there is no need to add specialized "game" classes, you can work with what is already there.
Wake Tech got an $800K grant from NSF to develop their curriculum. This money is not allowed to go to new hires, but can be spent on curriculum development and new equipment. Other schools may be able to get similar money, so it is worth looking into.

G. Michael Youngblood on Computer Science-focused game research:

Students can get involved through an NSF program called REU (Research Experience for Undergrads).
It's easy to get academics involved; this is what many of us do. Biggest challenge is collaboration across departments, since games are so interdisciplinary.
If you're working in industry and want to get involved, the easiest way is to visit. Invite some local researchers to lunch. Look at their stuff, read their papers, ask questions on what you don't understand.
You can support students for your own benefit! If you have an idea you'd like to test out, $1100 per month for a grad stipend x 5 months = $5500 for a prototype and white paper. This is a pretty good deal if you're a large studio with an R&D budget! Note that some schools and some researchers will ask to charge overhead (to cover costs of building maintenance, utilities, etc.) that is as much as 50% of your grant. You do not have to put up with this; operations costs are not required for non-governmental grants, and you can offer the funding on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Most universities would rather accept money than turn it down.
Be on a university's Industry Advisory Board. Suggest that they research difficult, interesting problems.

Michael's list of things that the industry should keep in mind when dealing with academic researchers (particularly in Computer Science):

Academics are extremely "paper-focused". If there's not a publication in it, then it doesn't matter.
Academics are always behind and have too much to do.
Like any programmer, academic researchers will overstate their ability to deliver for nearly everything.
If a study involves humans in any way (such as, say, using college students in a playtest of your game), learn about the IRB process.
The field of games research has matured quickly. Two years ago, "I'm working on a game" was good enough to get published. Today, you must also be able to show why your game research is cool or useful in some way.

Random tidbits from side conversations:

Games and learning are both negative feedback loops: once you have learned something, you don't want to learn it again. This drives students to learn something and then stop. We need to find a way to counteract this by including a positive feedback loop, so that great students will want to keep learning and to learn more.
I wonder if a school has ever hired an entire small development studio. Granted, not everyone has teaching skills, but you would get complete coverage of all subject areas and you'd be hiring people who already know how to work together as a team.
Giving students a general literacy of classic games is important. One approach: have students write "reviews" of classic games. How do you get them to play older arcade or console games in the first place, when the original hardware is hard to come by? Several alternatives: first, many companies are repackaging their classic games for sale on modern systems (Atari Flashback, Midway Classic Hits, original NES games downloadable on Wii, etc.); second, with questionable legality, you can download emulators such as MAME; and third, particularly useful in class, you can find short gameplay videos of just about everything on YouTube to show what some of these games looked and played like.

Topic for Discussion: Beating a Course

2009-06-13T14:48:00.003-04:00

Recently, someone wrote me about my book, claiming they had finished all of the challenges. I'm not sure if the person was serious (there are over 300 of them, after all), but it got me thinking about books and games, and the difference at the end of each.

It struck me that when most students finish a class, there is a sense of relief. "Finally, it's over. Now I can sell my textbook, throw away my notes, and forget all the stuff I just spend three months cramming into my brain." We approach games very differently. Maybe you just beat God of War 2 or Bioshock or Fallout 3 or whatever, and there is a sense of closure there... but there are also a bunch of locked Achievements, secret levels, more intense difficulty modes, different character classes or progressions, all kinds of other things that give the player incentive to keep going after it is "over".

What would classes be like if they had this kind of incentive system? Where students voluntarily chose to go back and read the chapters that weren't covered during the main course (the way they would explore optional levels after completing the main storyline of a game), do all of the end-of-chapter exercises that weren't assigned (like optional sidequests), write their own material summary to help other students (like writing a FAQ or Walkthrough of a game), or discuss the class and some of their ideas about the material with their friends?

"I just beat the final boss in Vector Calculus yesterday. But I was thinking of going back and collecting all the secret bonuses in each chapter, building up my Trig skill, and maybe going through the book again on Hard Mode and unlocking the bonus chapters on Differential Equations at the end. And I'm totally pre-ordering the sequel class, I hear they're releasing it in the Fall." It sounds ridiculous, but really, why not?

Student Post-Mortems

2009-06-08T09:20:00.003-04:00

In a class I taught that just finished, I had the students make a complete, full-featured, production-quality board game from scratch over the course of a month (this was the major project in the middle of the course). At the end, I asked everyone to do a personal "post-mortem" by listing the things that they felt went right and wrong in development.

The list of things I see are astonishingly similar to the professional post-mortems that you see on Gamasutra when people make video games, and I feel echoes of previous classes I've taught where students made video games. So, I think a lot of these lessons are generally applicable, and worth sharing.

Rather than breaking it down into things that went "right" or "wrong" in this particular class, I'll list these as general points of advice that were repeated themes throughout the class. Some students listed these as things they did well and were thankful for; other students listed the same things as weaknesses that they wished they had paid more attention to. For our purposes it doesn't matter; this is the advice that my class would give you and your students.

Playtest your game regularly, several times a week. Start as early as you possibly can. The earlier you start, the more time you have to make radical adjustments. You can never playtest too early or too much.
Playtest with a variety of people, not just the same group of friends. Test with family, classmates, complete strangers, anyone you can think of. New playtesters offer new insights. The wider variety of testers you have, the broader the appeal of your final game.
Start with a simple, strong core concept. If you don't know the purpose of your game or where the fun is supposed to come from, you'll have a hard time getting there. On the other hand, if you have some basic gameplay constraints that you create for yourself, a lot of gameplay will come naturally from that and it will feel like the game is making itself.
Be wary of oversimplification. In general, it is harder to simplify a game than to make it more complex, and you should strive to make your game as simple as possible. There is a flip side to this: if you are overzealous about streamlining the rules, it is possible to accidentally remove player interaction, interesting decisions, and strategic options. When you remove rules from your game to simplify, pay attention to the play to make sure you are not removing a critical element.
Observe people playing your game, without interfering. The learning curve of a game is critical, and the only way to gauge this is to have new players sit down and try to play without your assistance. Watch them struggle and see where they fail. This is one of the only ways to identify critical holes in your game in the end stages; as the designer, you are too close to your own creation to see the obvious flaws yourself.
Don't neglect theme. In an effort to build the best gameplay possible, don't forget that a strong theme that fits the mechanics can make the game easier to learn, and a fun theme can generate player interest from the start. Include something that players can personally identify with in the game, to make it easier for them to feel like they're "in the game."
Some mechanics are higher risk than others. If you are doing something that has never been done before (or has only been done rarely), the final project will take a bit more time, and you should be prepared for that. There is probably a reason why it hasn't been done before, and the reason is probably that it is hard to get it to work! If you are heading into uncharted design territory, expect to spend at least double the time on the project that you would have otherwise.
Pay attention to readability. Some color combinations make your game difficult to read (I've seen black text on a dark blue background which was nearly impossible to read, and also yellow text on a violet background which was just painful to look at). If you haven't studied color theory, at least look at all of the text and icons in your game and make sure you and your playtesters can read them without eye strain. Test in both bright light (e.g. outside in the sun) and low light conditions.
Leave time for "polish" at the end. When you have a month or two to make a game, it feels like you have forever. Realize that you would ideally like to have everything "done" earlier than the final deadline, so that you have plenty of time to make the game look more professional. Little details matter in the final presentation, but you will only have time for them if you don't procrastinate and if you build this expectation into your schedule. (Even then, it is often hard to do.)

There were also a couple of hints that are specific to board games:

If you are making any custom components, do "proofs" before paying to print the whole thing. For example, if you're printing many sheets of cards, print a single sheet to make sure everything lines up right and that the colors don't bleed.
Avoid printing double-sided if you can, because it's hard to get everything lined up. If you must, add a thick border which will help mask any cutting errors.
Allot plenty of time for creating final game components. Even if your rules are finalized and you know exactly what you need, the process of actually building everything (which might involve painting wooden pieces, printing at a local copy shop, cutting pieces, and any number of other things) takes a lot longer than you think it will, so don't leave it for the last minute.

Design versus Marketing

2009-06-06T13:09:00.001-04:00

Students who are hardcore gamers (i.e. most of them, if you're teaching game design) are used to seeing the marketing-speak on the back of a game box (we call this "box copy"). You've seen it before: "Over 30 levels! 300 weapons! Epic, engaging storyline! Intuitive combat system!"

Most of these students have never seen an actual game design document before. This would be the document that actually describes the details. Exactly what are the contents of each level? What are the names, damage, speed, accuracy and other effects of each weapon? What happens in the story, when exactly is each bit of story revealed to the player, how much is text and how much is voice acting, what is every last line of dialogue? How, exactly, does the combat system work and what are the controls? And so on.

It is, apparently, easy to get these mixed up. Box copy is useless if you're giving it to a programmer to implement. How does a programmer write code for "intuitive combat system" exactly? The answer is that they don't -- they kick it back to the designer until they get the details.

I'm seeing this more and more with students lately, and I'll be taking additional steps in the future to warn them of the difference between design and marketing. I wonder if other teachers see this as frequently as I am... and what, if anything, they do about it.

Academic Program as MMO

2009-05-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

On the IGDA Education list, fellow industry-vet-turned-educator Kevin O'Gorman made a great comment that I wish I'd thought of first:

There's the curriculum you roll the program out with (fingers crossed the people that pulled it together were at least aware of the Ed SIG Curriculum Framework) and then the tinkering and fine tuning that goes on from that point on. It's like an MMO -- the launch is the beginning, not the end of the process.

How far can we take this analogy? Pretty far, actually...

Both academic programs and MMOs need hefty amounts of resources to initially develop, before either one of them sees a single paid player/student.
Both are based on a similar pay model: pay-per-month or pay-per-semester, regardless of how many classes you take or how often you're logged in.
Multiple sections of a course are the academic equivalent of instanced dungeons.
Character classes are the MMO equivalent of an academic major.
Look at a skill/tech tree for a class in a typical MMO. Looks suspiciously like a list of classes and prereqs, doesn't it? (Hint to game schools: try adding a "tech tree" diagram to your course catalog and see if it doesn't remove half the pain from your academic advising.)
In theory, an MMO wants its players to stick around forever; in practice, it's recognized that there is regular churn (you could call this the game equivalent of "graduation"), and so the developer/school must be concerned with attracting new customers/students as well as retaining existing ones.

The analogy does break down eventually. I don't think I've ever sent my students on a "fedex quest" in exchange for grades, nor can my students buy better equipment in my classes in exchange for cash. Students could theoretically sell their work to others at an online "auction house" but it's against the TOS/EULA of a class to turn in work that isn't yours (unlike many MMOs). You can buy "pre-leveled" characters but not a "pre-completed" degree.

Still, perhaps schools could be improved in some aspects if administrators took some cues from WoW.

Career Advice for Teachers and Designers: Do, Don't Show, Don't Tell

2009-05-18T15:19:00.000-04:00

There is something that has taken me many years to learn, after observing a number of other game designers and the systems that affect their careers. It boils down to something like this:

If you have to tell everyone how great you are, then you're not.

The best designers do not have to "self-promote" within the industry, because they have worked with other people who respect them enough to be their willing evangelists. As soon as you spend too much effort trying to build yourself up, that is precisely when the rest of the industry will gleefully tear you down. If you feel unappreciated, like you're just not getting a fair shake and you're not getting the attention and appreciation you deserve, it is because there are so many talented people out there competing for that same attention. Best move is to be patient and not overreach; yes, you will feel underappreciated for awhile, but in time your good work will come back to you.

If, by contrast, you spend a lot of time and effort convincing people that you're God's gift to game design, the worst possible outcome is that you succeed in your efforts. And then you're given a project that is beyond what you can handle. But you won't realize it, and you'll take the entire project down with you, and your co-workers will not thank you for their pink slips when the studio closes.

The same rule applies to teachers, but in a different way.

There is a temptation as a teacher to drum up attention for your classes. You want students to know that you're teaching all these cool classes about video games. You want enough students taking your classes that it proves to the higher-ups that there is demand and that they need to throw more resources at your program. You (and probably your boss and boss's boss) want "butts in the seats" under the assumption that if only enough people take these classes, they'll see how awesome they are and spread the word.

This leads to a similar problem as with the industry. If you promote your classes, you will get some students who either feel compelled to take them by your high-pressure tactics, or you will get students who are largely unmotivated and assume that "game class" equals an easy A. Neither of these students really wants to be in your class, nor will they try particularly hard.

In the long term, I'm thinking that the best way to promote your classes is to spend all your time making your classes a great experience. If the classes are that awesome, your students will evangelize for you, and they'll do it better than you can. Your initial class population might be lower, but it will also be more motivated and energetic because those students had to do some work just to take the class -- they had to find out that it was there, and they had to read the course description and probably talk to their advisor to see if this was for real, and they had to sign up on a leap of faith without encouragement from you. These are the students you want in your class.

In both industry and academia, this is the advice I would give:

Spend your time doing great things. Don't spend as much time showing or telling about your work. Let others discover it for themselves.

Back to basics...

2009-05-15T11:27:00.004-04:00

A student is admiring my Ra board.
"Is that signed by Reiner Knizia?" he asks. It is. He even pronounces the name correctly.

I mention that at home, I also have a chessboard signed by Garry Kasparov.
The student asks, "who's that?"

Sigh.

Just when I think I've got this education thing down, I find out that there's more work to do.

Types of Student/Beginner Design Projects

2009-05-07T13:18:00.002-04:00

There are many kinds of project that help someone to learn design. Some are more or less appropriate in the different stages of a student's educational experience.

Non-digital games (i.e. Eurogames). Design a complete non-digital game (such as a board game, card game, or tile-laying game) from scratch.

Advantages of Eurogames:

These kinds of games represent game design in its purest form. The design is laid bare, and cannot be concealed by high-poly-count art or impressive technology.
These games can be built very quickly and cheaply. To make a "first playable" version takes only a few minutes, typically using only simple components like index cards and notebook paper.
They tend to play quickly, which gives a lot of opportunity for playtesting, iteration, and polish if extended to a longer project (1 or 2 month time frame).

Disadvantages of Eurogames:

Does not often meet student expectations. Students starting out in a video game development curriculum may be confused or frustrated that they are not working on video games. Extra care must be taken to justify the concept.
In America, board games have a poor reputation from our culturally-accepted "family game" fare of Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders, the Game of Life, and other children's games. Initial exposure to Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Bohnanza, and the like requires a massive paradigm shift on the part of most people.
Because students have little experience with board games, many "original" ideas are actually things that have been done before, but the student is not aware. In my classes there's always at least one student who sponteneously and unintentionally re-invents some classic game that they've never heard of. These projects require a lot of guidance and game-literacy on the part of the teacher.
Some aspects of Eurogame design do not directly apply to video games. For example, it's hard to simulate the satisfying feel of pressing a button to make Mario jump in a board game.

Recommended for:

A student's first experience to the world of game design.

Tabletop RPGs. Design the system for an RPG, playable by one mediator ("GM") and a small group of players. I would also include LARPs and, to a lesser extent, ARGs in this category.

Advantages of RPGs:

Most students are at least familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, so prior experience is not a problem. A fair number are enthusiasts of the form, so this will generate a fair amount of excitement.
Most RPGs require a strong integration between gameplay and story, making them ideal for the study of both game-based storytelling and core systems design.
As with Eurogames, the system is laid bare in the rules, making RPGs a very pure form of design (even moreso than Eurogames, as most RPGs only have a handbook and not even any board or game bits).

Disadvantages of RPGs:

RPGs are a very specialized form of design that may not immediately carry over into some other game media or genres.
The enjoyment of an RPG relies largely on having a good GM and a good set of players. Good play can salvage bad design (and poor play can wreck a great design), making it difficult to evaluate a game purely on its own merits.
RPGs take a long time to play. Typical play sessions last several hours, played regularly over the course of months or years. This greatly slows the number of playtests and iterations allowed in the space of a single course.
Take a look at a professionally-printed RPG rulebook some time. Many are in the hundreds of pages, and are too large in scope for a student project. Even if you remove a lot of the fluff and filler, something as "small" as a 15-page rule set will still seem large to a typical undergrad student.
Since RPGs integrate story and gameplay, it's important to have a solid understanding of both before taking on this kind of project. Learning how to tell good stories is hard. Learning how to design a solid and balanced rule set is also hard. Doing both together at the same time is too hard.

Recommended for:

A mid-level elective course, with an intro game design course and an intro storytelling course as prerequisites.

Video games. Of course, when most students are thinking of "making games" they are thinking of video games. Generally, at the student level, I would subdivide this into two types of video game projects: very small and short individual projects, and mid-sized group projects. Most students would prefer to make large AAA video games, the kind that take several years with a team of hundreds of professionals, but of course the scope is too large for a college course.

Advantages of individual video games:

Students really get to take ownership of their project, and it is usually very exciting for them to be making their own original video game.
A truly outstanding student project has the possibility of winning an IGF award, which is a big deal.
This is the most practical form of experience for students who want to make video games as a career.

Disadvantages of individual video games:

Most individuals do not have art, sound, programming, and game design expertise, so some students will be disappointed and frustrated at their inability to do certain things in their project.
Scope control is a problem with inexperienced students, who tend to design more than they can reasonably implement in a length of time. It requires a sharp eye and quick response from the professor to get students to keep their projects manageable.
Because it is not going to be a AAA game, some students will take a small project less seriously than they should.
At the very least, an individual game requires both programming and game design skill (art and sound can be fudged more easily). Learning programming is hard. Learning game design is also hard. Trying to learn both at the same time is too hard, and is the reason why so many people fail when they start out trying to program their own game from scratch as their first hobby project.

Recommended for:

High-level class with a lot of prerequisites. Concentrates on showing students how to assemble all these various component parts in order to make a complete video game.
High-level class with several game design and programming prerequisites. Concentrates on rapid prototyping, and making games that are ugly but functional as a way to test out certain mechanics or ideas. (A lot of prototyping can be done on paper, but some things like User Interface are best done digitally.)
Intermediate programming class, with a game design class as prerequisite. Students learn programming while applying what they already know about game design.
Introductory programming class, where the game design is done by the professor ahead of time and students can concentrate solely on implementation.

Advantages of group video games:

Most directly simulates the interdisciplinary team environment found in the industry.
Students can specialize; each individual does not have to be good at everything, as long as they are very good with at least one thing.
Allows for larger scope than individual projects (although still not as large as AAA games).
Like individual projects, an outstanding group project is potentially IGF material.

Disadvantages of group video games:

Most students do not have a lot of experience working in teams. Lots of things can go wrong: an individual unmotivated student that drags down the team, communication lapses between students that make integration difficult, the design team overscoping the project, personal conflicts between team members, and all of the other general chaos that happens when people try to work together.
Since this requires students from several disciplines, you usually have to recruit from multiple departments. Setting up a cross-listed class and getting the go-ahead from outside your home department is a bureaucratic nightmare. Getting a good mix of students with varied abilities is likewise difficult.
Students will tend to bite off more than they can chew, especially once they realize that they have so many people working on a project. Getting them to start small and add (rather than starting big and cutting) is always a challenge.

Recommended for:

A senior-level "capstone" course, after students have already taken all of the core courses in their respective majors.

Culture Shock: Academic Freedom vs. Industry Constraints

2009-05-03T00:26:00.005-04:00

When reading about Brenda Brathwaite's series of non-digital games (this includes games about such heavy topics as the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, and the Holocaust), it struck me that this kind of project would never happen in the game industry.

I don't mean that it would never get publisher funding. I mean, it wouldn't, but that's not my point. My point is, even if it were on her own time with her own money outside of work, this would never be allowed to happen.

Think about it. Suppose you were a working game developer and you casually mentioned to some co-workers that you were thinking of making an art piece and showing it at galleries, and that the topic was highly controversial and this was sure to have a lot of people cheering, and a lot of other people up in arms. How many nanoseconds would it take before your producer found you at your desk and asked you very nicely not to do this, out of fear that the Company would receive negative media backlash, and this is the last thing we need when we're courting three publishers for our next contract, so if you're interested on working on non-digital games maybe you could make something about fluffy bunnies instead? (I suppose some companies make controversy part of their business plan, but I'm talking about everyone else.)

This is a completely different paradigm than academia, where the whole concept of tenure is (at least in theory) supposed to be about the freedom to do anything, no matter how controversial. As an academic, you actually get support for things like this. You can sometimes get funding for things like this. Not everywhere, I'm sure, but it seems more likely that a random school will at least not get in your way if you want to take on a controversial product, compared to a random game company. One more point to consider if you're considering a career in either and you prefer to have total creative freedom.

Back on regular posting schedule

2009-04-25T15:32:00.003-04:00

I've been out of commission for a while, due to GDC and then GDX. I'm just about caught up.

For what it's worth, there are video recordings of some great GDX sessions online. Mine isn't on there (maybe I used too many swear words?), but the ones posted are excellent. Highly recommend Jason Arnone's and Jon Jones's talks for any aspiring visual artists, Mark Nelson's talk for anyone interested in open-world games, and Andrew Baines for any aspiring FPS level designers out there. Jason Rohrer's talk was more conceptual than practical (as keynotes tend to be) and focuses on why games don't have the cultural legitimacy of other established media -- something that anyone in game studies would do well to consider.

And if you're ever down in the Savannah area during GDX in the future, I'd highly recommend attending. Great speakers, small and intimate/casual atmosphere, lots of great talks and great people all around.

Game Design Concepts: an Experiment

2009-03-31T11:18:00.001-04:00

For those of you who I met at GDC and found their way here, welcome!

One thing I talked to a lot of people about is an experiment I'm doing this Summer, called "Game Design Concepts."

This is a free online class that I'm going to teach. It is not affiliated with any college or university, and not for credit. It will be taught through a combination of blog, email and wiki. It contains all of the information (and then some) in one of the game design classes that I normally teach in a classroom in exchange for tuition money. But I'm releasing it for free this Summer.

The subject of the course is, as you might expect, game design. The intended audience is:

Students who are interested in game design, and either are at a school that doesn't teach it well or doesn't teach it at all (or maybe you just want a second opinion).

Teachers, especially those who teach game design. You can compare my material with that of your own class. Maybe you'll find some useful resources that you didn't know about, and maybe you'll be able to offer me some hints in return.

Game developers who aren't designers. In a lot of companies, game design is still considered something of a "dark art" and those who aren't designers are often curious about how game design is done. In a few hours a week, this whole other field can (hopefully) be demystified.

Game designers. Do you have an interest in contributing to education? Do you want to know what it is that the next generation of designers -- the ones who are likely to report to you in 4 to 6 years -- are being taught in the classroom? This is a way to find out, and contribute your own experience in the process.

Anyone else with an interest in learning more about game design. For example, parents or grandparents of game designers who are curious about what these kids are doing; or hardcore gamers who want greater insight into the design decisions that make their favorite games so great.

If I've got your attention and interest, the blog is at gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com and all updates (including instructions to register) will be posted there.

Gearing up for GDC

2009-03-17T09:18:00.004-04:00

It's that time of year again. I can't believe it starts in less than a week.

If you're going to GDC this year for the first time, here's a link to my advice for what to bring with you. And here's another link to Darius's store of GDC advice. Be prepared!

If anyone wants to meet up, there are three easy places to find me. First, I'm speaking at the Game Education Summit on Monday. Second, I'll definitely be at the blogger group gathering on Thursday. Third, it's tradition by now that I'll be up early for breakfast on 3rd floor of Moscone West each morning, at the tables right near where the escalators dump you out. Look for the guy who has board and card games.

Culture Shock: Learning Disabilities

2009-03-15T14:08:00.000-04:00

Autism. Aspberger. OCD. ADD. ADHD. Tourette's. Bipolar. You name it, someone in the game industry has it. Probably several someones, and probably at least one someone who is incredibly successful.

For this reason, it's hard for me to even call these "disabilities" -- given that the word "disabled" literally means that the person is not able to do something, and clearly it is possible to make games regardless of what psychological label might be applied to someone. But then, I'm not a psychologist.

For the most part, people in the game industry don't care if you've been diagnosed with anything, as long as you can help them make great games. You could be criminally psychotic for all we care, as long as it doesn't impact the development schedule. (Okay, I exaggerate. But only slightly.)

So, it took me by surprise the first time a student gave me this little slip of paper from the campus office of disabilities, several years ago (I've since gotten used to this ritual; it seems there's always at least one per class, and usually more).

For those of you who have not taught before, here's how it works: the student brings you this paper that gives you (as the teacher) no practical information, except to tell you that the student requires some special privilege (commonly, extra time and privacy when taking exams). You have to sign it -- in all the places I've taught, I've never been allowed to keep a copy -- and then the student takes it back. Presumably it gets filed somewhere, I don't know.

And then, naturally, you forget about it, because you're not allowed to keep a copy. Until exam time comes, and you remember that two of your students have special requirements, but you can't remember which students (many students with so-called "disabilities" are quite high-functioning), and one of them might have dropped your class a few weeks back anyway. Oops. I've been doing this for a few years and I still manage to screw this up most of the time.

The most frustrating thing, though, is that you're given no information about how to teach more effectively. I understand and accept that we're dealing with confidential information on a need-to-know basis, and I will often be getting the bare minimum of relevant information. But this conflicts with a desire to teach properly, and if I know that (for example) talking more slowly or repeating myself will help or hurt the situation, or if making my lecture notes available is useful, or if I should avoid calling on a student in class because it would embarass them... well, it'd be good to know, but there's no way for me to find out without a confidentiality breach.

The obvious thing to do in these situations is to talk to the student directly, and simply ask if there's anything you can do... but often the student doesn't know, because they aren't a professional educator.

Best solution, I suppose, is to take matters into my own hands. Read books on as many of these disabilities as I can find, particularly any that might give clues on how to teach better, and hope for the best.

Last-Minute Begging

2009-03-12T11:32:00.000-04:00

I see this happen from all kinds of people.

Students: "I know I haven't turned in half of the assignments and I haven't been in class for the last month and this is the last week of the term, but I'm failing the class and is there any way I can do something for extra credit?"

Professors: "I know grades for this term were due a few weeks ago, but I've been so busy with other things that I never got around to sending them in. I hope that didn't inconvenience you by preventing your graduation, or making it impossible for you to get a final transcript for that job you're applying to. I'll get it in this week, I promise!"

Professionals: "I know you asked me how I was doing on my task list every week for the entire project and I've said fine, but I realize now I'm three weeks behind and we've got a milestone due tomorrow. Can I get some help?"

For some reason, some people have a really hard time saying that they're behind until it's too late to do anything about it. And yes, I've been guilty of this in the past, which makes me quick to spot it in others.

Now if only I can find a way to convince students of the danger of this without them having to live through the hell-stress of being about to fail, before the lesson sinks in...

IDEO's Ten Tips for Teachers

2009-03-04T12:40:00.002-05:00

Brenda pointed me at this article about creating a "21st century classroom experience." This has nothing to do with game design per se, except that just about all of these tips are restatements of basic game design principles, suggesting once again that game design is applied education (or maybe it's the other way around).

Summary of the tips and their context as a game design teacher (several points in the article are restatements of one another, so I collapsed them):

Don't just push information. Encourage students to think critically by creating an environment where the students can (and want to) ask questions. Translation: let the player actually play in your game world. How fun would a game be if it just told the player to enter a certain code and then asked them to play it back?
Make it relevant. Don't just explain arbitrary facts, put it in the context of how they're actually used so the students can see a connection between theory and practice. I've already written about that a couple of times.
Soft skills are important. What will really make the difference is your students' abilities in leadership, empathy, communication, teamwork, and other things that are hard to measure on multiple choice exams. This is why games like The Sims and World of Warcraft are popular, despite them not having distinct measurable goals.
Allow for variation. Education isn't one-size-fits-all; different students have different levels of ability and prior experience. Translation: include multiple difficulty levels in your game.
Give practical experience, not just theory. The article goes so far as to say that teachers are "designers" so apparently I'm not the only one saying this. Translation: if it's nothing more than a series of cut scenes, it isn't a very fun game. Or, as Sid Meier has famously said, "if the designer is having more fun than the player, you have made a terrible mistake."

Teaching Iteration and Risk-Taking

2009-03-01T22:22:00.003-05:00

There is an inherent conflict between the nature of classes and course objectives, when it comes to designing a game as a class project.

The best way to learn to design games is to make a rapid prototype, fail miserably, figure out what you did wrong, and try again. Repeat until you get it right. In order to do this, the student has to feel like it is okay to take risks, that it is perfectly acceptable (even expected) to try crazy stuff that may simply not work out.

But of course, this is for a grade. Enter the fear of failure. Or, it's not for a grade at all. No threat of failure, but likely no effort put in by students on an "optional" project. Is there a way around this paradox?

Here's the method I'm currently using:

My non-digital game design project has four milestones. The first is just a high concept, target audience, basic information (number of players, etc.) and some core mechanics. The second is a rough but playable prototype. The third is a playtested prototype, with the mechanics finalized or close to it. The final milestone is a polished product.
All milestones are graded. Early milestones are easy points -- just turn in something, anything, as long as it works. Later milestones are graded based on the quality of the design -- you'd better have done some iterations.
For the future, I'm thinking that early milestones should be worth fewer points than later milestones. This puts less importance on early work and more focus on the final product.
On the days where milestones are due, students bring their works-in-progress to class and present the work for peer review. This also gives me a chance to see how the projects are progressing. In the future, I should probably just give a grade right then and there for the early milestones.
Make it clear to students from the beginning that the more they iterate on their project, the more they playtest, the more they fail and then change, the better their final project will be. Unfortunately, this is one of those things they might just have to find out the hard way for themselves. I'll try bringing in a student work from an earlier course (with permission) in its various stages of completion, to show just how much difference playtesting can make.

Blogging on Applied Game Design

2009-02-28T22:00:00.002-05:00

In addition to this blog, Brenda has given me the ability to post on the Applied Game Design blog, so I will occasionally make posts over there about the theory and practice of game design.

Why not just post here? I want this blog to remain a resource for students and educators about teaching game design, and my own rantings on how to actually make better games are best done elsewhere.

Any post over there by 'ai864' is me. I've already made my first post.

I will still be writing here about teaching game design, of course.

Theory of Fun back in print!

2009-02-25T21:49:00.002-05:00

Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design has been out of print for a few years, making it obnoxiously difficult for anyone to actually buy it for less than $200 or so.

Happily, it is now back in print for about $15.

I suspect a lot of teachers will suddenly be adding another book to their required texts next term...

Global Game Jam article on Gamasutra

2009-02-25T13:29:00.003-05:00

For those of you who are wondering what was going on during the Global Game Jam, Stephen Jacobs wrote up a fantastic blow-by-blow account of the action. His article is on Gamasutra.

I'm even quoted a few times in the article.

Sometimes, I teach a little too well...

2009-02-20T16:42:00.003-05:00

The other day, I met some people who are thinking of hiring a game designer, I mention that I'm available for contract work.

One of my students who was present stepped in front of me and mentioned that he's also available, and cheaper to hire than me.

I know that I always say to pay attention, be observant, be ready to pounce on an opportunity... and apparently some of them actually listen. I'm thinking that, in the long run, this is probably a good thing.

Summer Internships

2009-02-18T21:35:00.001-05:00

The question was recently raised on the IGDA Game Educators mailing list: how can students find summer internships in games? If you're a student, this is probably on your mind; if you're a professor, students will probably ask you. I posted a response there, but I thought it's worth saying here.

First, let me say that internships in the game industry are rare. This is not about game companies being mean, or hating students. It's because game projects typically take longer than a summer, and development teams don't particularly like it when a key project member leaves in mid-project. It also takes people time to ramp up, which means just around the time the intern is finally able to contribute something to the team, they leave. Also, interns take a lot of management time that a typically-overworked producer does not have, so many studios decide that it's just not worth it.

This is not to say that internships don't exist, merely that the companies that offer them tend to be low-key about it (lest they be flooded with tens of thousands of resumes from eager college students). That means they aren't advertising, so you have to find them other ways (see below).

My advice to students seeking summer employment:

First, do your homework. Research a lot of game companies, go to their corporate websites and see if they have internship programs. Best bets are local companies, since realistically you aren't going to get housing or relocation expenses (some companies won't even consider you for an internship unless you live in the area). Be willing to look at lesser-known companies (not just the big names that you drool over), and look in related fields like serious games -- fewer students are looking there, so there's less competition.

How do you find local developers? First, check GameDevMap. Second, check if there's a local IGDA chapter. Third, check Google with a search string that implies game developers in your local area. Fourth, check with your school's career services office... but you probably won't find anything there that you couldn't have found on your own, which is why I list it last.

Some "internships" may not be listed as such; rather, they may be called "QA" positions that just happen to span the summer term.

If you can't find anything in games, consider a related industry. Programmers can do a programming internship at any software company and still gain valuable experience. Artists could work in fields like advertising or industrial design.

If you absolutely can't find any paid work, finances permitting, "hire" yourself full-time to work on your own game projects! Force yourself to work 40+ hours per week on your own game, as if you were at a full-time job. (This works even better if you have some friends you can team up with.) Keep your scope small, so that your projects are achievable. The point here isn't to "start a game company" or "make a great game and sell it" -- the point is to get valuable experience making games. If your project sucks, that's fine, as long as you learned something from the process. If your project does end up being awesome, enter it in the IGF student showcase, which is just as juicy a resume bullet-point as an internship (if you win).

Does "online" mean "automated"?

2009-02-15T21:35:00.004-05:00

It seems to me that every school that offers online courses does things a bit differently. For the classes that I teach online, I try to have as much interactivity as I have time for. I'll post on discussion boards, I host virtual "office hours" through an online chat program, and I send out regular emails with my own personal spin on the topic. I also offer feedback through grading papers, even if it takes me longer.

I realized today that in theory, the entire thing could be automated:

The course content is all online, so there's no reason why I need to add anything to it. Let the students read it on their own without the professor offering any extra commentary.
The discussion boards are for students to interact with each other, not the professor. When "participation" is one of the grades of the course, there are tools where you can get post counts, average length of post, and all kinds of usage stats without ever having to actually, you know, read what one of those student people is actually saying.
Papers can't be automated easily, but if you design the course you could go light on those assignments and heavy on multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank quizzes which can be graded by a computer system.
Instead of holding regular "office hours", simply post your phone number and let students call if they need help with anything. You know they never will, whether it be from feelings of politeness or intimidation.

Not that I would ever teach this way, mind you. I don't think it's really teaching if I'm not involved, it's more like a long, drawn-out certification process.

On the other hand, it's easy to "teach" a class this way, so I'm sure there are people out there who do it like that. Some might just be overwhelmed with other things in life so they fall back on something easy. Others might be greedy and want extra pay for next to no effort. Still others might think this is what online classes are supposed to be, that once you get a computer involved it somehow means humans should be removed from the equation.

I suppose the lesson here for students is: buyer beware. Make sure that you're getting your money's worth when signing up for an online class, and make sure you know what kind of instruction and personalized attention you can expect. If all you're looking for is a few quick credit hours without having to leave your dorm room that's one thing, but if you're actually looking for an education then do your due diligence. (Put at least as much effort into shopping for a class as you might into getting a high-end stereo system for your dorm, since that's probably about what you're paying.)

Interestingly, I think there's a parallel here with outsourcing in the game industry, in that many companies that think "outsourcing" really want the thing they're outsourcing to be automated (and they find out to their chagrin that game development is not so easy a process to automate).

What is the teacher's most valuable IP?

2009-02-11T14:16:00.004-05:00

I have an ongoing discussion with several colleagues about the basic question of where a teacher's value lies. This is particularly important in a field like game design, where a new professor is likely going to be the only one in the department with any game-related expertise and will therefore be doing some curriculum development, some course content development, and of course the actual teaching.

There seem to be two schools of thought with respect to this.

The first model, I'll call "value in output." The professor is a machine that converts money and coffee into curriculum and course materials. The real value is in these secrets of the field that the professor distills into small documents like lesson plans and curriculum documents. This is valuable information that must be protected. You can tell the schools that think this way because they have something in their contracts that makes sure the school gets IP ownership of the professor's work, or (at the very least) they would be very much against a professor releasing this material to the public, or taking it to another school.

The second model, I'll call "value in person." The idea is that it is the professor who is valuable, not the work. A skilled professor can always create more classes, revise the curriculum or what have you, and it is therefore the human being that has value. An analogy would be valuing the goose more than the golden eggs. You can tell the schools that fall into this category by their willingness to release their course content online, give their professors more control over their own work output, and are generally happy to just sit back and do nothing as long as the profs are bringing glory to the school.

We have this in the game industry, too. Where is the value in a game: the IP, the code base, or the development team? Depending on a publisher's viewpoint, they will treat their developers very differently.

If you're a teacher or a developer, think for a moment about how your school (or your publisher) sees you and your contributions. Is there more focus on your work output, or your ongoing ability to produce that output? Which view is superior? If the answer is "it depends," what does it depend on?

Speaking Schedule

2009-02-07T13:07:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I was in Savannah giving a presentation with Brenda at SCAD to other educators about the use of games as a teaching tool. It was intended as a combination of my earlier Origins presentations and our Game Design Improv event.

I learned something interesting here: when talking about games in education, I take for granted that most of the time I'm talking to educators who already play games heavily (or teach game development), so the use of games in the classroom is not a hard sell. In this case I was speaking with professors from art history, photography, audio, film, media studies, and several other fields that are not directly related to games. We spent a lot of time discussing whether games were worthwhile for classroom use at all, and if so in what situations. It was a wonderful discussion that really challenged us all, and it's a discussion I'm not used to having. I was also impressed by the high degree of game literacy from these professors who were not gamers; participants referenced a number of game industry personalities and important games. Apparently it's not just game designers who study other media; they're paying attention to us, also.

Coming up, I've got a few speaking engagements. I'm speaking at GDC, both times during the Education Summit. I speak twice: I'm doing the next iteration of Game Design Improv with Brenda, and also speaking with Susan Gold and Gorm Lai about the results of the Global Game Jam.

The month after that, I'll be at GDX (here's last year's site, the new one isn't up yet), speaking about the relationships between art history and game design -- basically, why game designers should take at least one art history class, and why they should pay attention. (Short answer: because we may feel like games are a new medium and we're blazing new trails, but an awful lot of what we're doing with games-as-art is stuff that the art world already addressed hundreds of years ago, and we need to understand this so we don't keep reinventing the wheel.)

Running for IGDA Board

2009-02-02T13:35:00.002-05:00

The IGDA elections are underway, with four board seats open. I've thrown my hat into the ring.

If my personal statement sounds like something that resonates with you, I'd appreciate your vote. And if you're not a member of the IGDA... well, this is as good an excuse as any to join.

Thanks for your support.

Global Game Jam this weekend

2009-01-28T10:11:00.002-05:00

After many months of planning, site wrangling and organizing, the Global Game Jam will take place this weekend. We have 54 host sites in 51 different cities, 24 countries and 14 time zones. We're currently looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 participants. It's pretty amazing how big it's grown in just the last few months.

I'll be providing realtime support to the sites for the entire weekend (minus the time when I'm sleeping) from my home office in Columbus.

If you're not already signed up, see if there's a location near you.

Awkward Moments

2009-01-20T14:01:00.000-05:00

A short collection of social awkwardness as experienced by a game-designer-turned-educator, in no particular order:

Having several students admit that they played a game you worked on, when you know the game in question wasn't particularly good. (Additional awkwardness: when the game in question is M-rated, and you know that the students were underage when they played it.)

Giving a game design constraint for an in-class exercise, and repeatedly being asked questions about the exact boundaries of the constraint... and realizing simultaneously that my students are trying to weasel out of the constraint (and that I should be annoyed), and also that my students are trying to precisely define the constraint (which is an important skill for game designers, and something I should be proud of).

Witnessing a student fall asleep in class, and hoping that it's because the student got no sleep and not because I've really become that boring. (Additional awkwardness: waking the student up, and hoping that I done it in a way that I haven't cruelly humiliated them.)

Assigning a homework that's not only easy but actually fun, and seeing that half the class didn't bother to complete it. And then wondering if my definition of "fun" has changed.

Writing something out (an assignment, a syllabus, an email, etc.) that I thought was clear as could be, and having students not understand it. This either means I'm not as good a writer as I thought, or that my students aren't functionally literate, or that my students are lazy... and no matter which it is, there's nothing I can be happy about.

Book Writing: Tips, Tricks, Cheat Codes

2009-01-14T14:09:00.000-05:00

Because we're both game developers, Brenda and I conducted a post-mortem of the book we wrote. Because many professors write their own textbook eventually, I thought it might be nice to share what we learned with you. (After securing the go-ahead from Brenda, of course.)

To protect the innocent, I won't say what we got "right" or "wrong"... but this is what we learned, for better or worse.

Write with a co-author that you already know you work well with. I really can't stress this enough. Aside from halving the amount of work you have to do, it's great to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and it's kind of like having an extra technical editor for free. It's also a lot harder for the project to stall when you know that someone else is counting on you (a friend and colleague, not just some monolithic book publisher).
Use some kind of version control system. It doesn't have to be as elaborate as Visual SourceSafe or CVS, but you will be making many changes and revisions to documents, and you will want to have a history in case you need to reference that paragraph that you deleted three months ago and now you want to use it in a different chapter. We found that simply numbering the documents (Chapter01_v1.doc) was sufficient.
Use the Track Changes functionality in Word. It's great. It's like a version history built-in. Use the comments to communicate with your editor and other authors.
If you're working with another author, use Google Docs for preliminary work. It's a free, convenient way to share chapters, and if you're on an instant messaging program (or on the phone) you can even edit the same document at the same time. You can always add any special formatting later, after importing into Word.
Keep track of the current status of each chapter (not started, rough draft complete, final draft complete, submitted to publisher, accepted by publisher) in an Excel document. Update it whenever you finish anything. This is especially important if working with another author, so you know who is currently editing what (you run into a lot of "did you finish this chapter and it's waiting for me to review, or were you still working on it?" questions).
Choose your book topic carefully, and whenever possible write about what you already know. Everything that you have to research takes extra time, and a book where you have to research everything will take a lot of time.
When you're working with the publisher on the initial schedule, build time in the schedule for iteration. There are a lot of tasks that affect the entire book (consistent formatting, terminology, overall structure and other things) that you'll want to change several times as you write, and the easiest way to do this is just to make one final pass over everything at the end... rather than making these changes several times over the course of the project. But you only get to do this if there's time, and if you're rushing to meet the deadline then the whole thing can look a bit sloppy.
As a corollary, keep a list of open issues for the book, so that nothing falls through the cracks. Keep it updated whenever you run into a problem that you want to defer until later, and reference it when you're doing revisions.
Find people to review different parts of your book (friends, colleagues, grad students... anyone who you think would give you good feedback for any particular chapter) and start that process early. If you're writing a textbook intended for classroom use, teach a class from an early version to see how it will actually function (think of it as a "beta test").
Get constraints from your publisher early on regarding number of chapters and pages, and find out the approximate ratio of pages in Word to printed pages in the book (a ten-page Word document might be twice as many pages in the book because of extra whitespace added to sections so the paragraphs aren't split between multiple pages, or to allow extra space around figures and photo images). This prevents you from finding at the end of the project that you suddenly have to add or cut a bunch of content.
While I'm on the subject of images, get your images early. Securing the rights to photos of people, screenshots of games, company logos, and so on takes a lot of time.
Develop a system for references to other parts of the book (for example, "See Chapter X, Page Y" when you don't know what the final chapter and page numbers will be). If you use actual numbers, you'll just have to end up changing them later... and woe to you if you accidentally miss one.
Create a core statement for the book up front. Do you want to write in a professional or casual tone? Do you want to focus more on content or concepts? What is the underlying theme, the one thing you really want the reader to understand when they're done -- the common thread that ties everything together? Revisit your core statement when you're reviewing or revising your chapters.
Clear your schedule if at all possible. Writing a book takes a lot of time, and if you're trying to balance that with teaching classes, doing freelance work and remodeling your kitchen, you are just not going to have the energy. If you minimize your downtime and interruptions, things will go more smoothly.
Do your due diligence with publishers. If you've got a great idea for a book, then it should be a great idea no matter who the publisher is. Seek publishers who have a line of successful books in your field, so that you can get some decent cross-pollination with readers of other books in the same series. Look for publishers with wide distribution networks. Think of whether your publisher has the means and understanding to promote your book (or, whether they're willing to let you do some self-promotion). Find out who your editor(s) will be, and how much experience they have (if any) in your field; if you've written a book before, you may be able to request a specific editor for your book. At any rate, there's no reason why you should just take the first offer that comes along and accept all terms without negotiation... any more than you would with a job offer.
Keep backups of everything. If all of your work is on your home computer hard drive and that hard drive crashes five days before the next scheduled milestone submission to the publisher... well, I'm sure you can imagine.
And lastly, don't expect to get rich as a book author, any more than you would as a game developer. The advance you can expect as an author is not very much when you compare to the amount of time you're going to spend on the project. Yes, you can make a lot of money if your book sells well enough to earn you royalties, but that is the exception and not the rule. This doesn't mean you shouldn't write a book... but if you write one, do it for reasons other than money.

If there are any other textbook authors in the audience, please comment and share your own tips.

One Easy Step Towards Interactive Teaching

2009-01-08T21:12:00.003-05:00

I've said before that classes are more interesting to students if you can make them more game-like, i.e. to give the students some interactivity (if not actual decision-making) rather than just lecturing at them.

If you're a teacher who is used to just speaking at your students and want to break yourself of the habit, here's an easy experiment for you to try in your next class:

1) Look over your lesson plan, and pick out one thing that is ambiguous, unknown, open to interpretation, or otherwise has no "right" side or answer. (Example in a biology class: the definition of the term "life".)
2) Design an open-ended question about the thing you chose. (Continuing the above example: "How would you define the term life?")
3) At some point in your lecture, ask the question to your class, and wait for the students to try to answer. If it takes a few seconds before you see any raised hands, that means they're actually thinking about your question, which is a good sign (or it means they're asleep, which is a sign that you've been lecturing for too long). Sometimes students will raise their hand to elaborate on (or even disagree with) a previous student's answer; encourage this, as you're creating an interactive dialogue among your students. If one student gives an answer and no one else feels like adding to it, challenge it yourself; play devil's advocate. But if at all possible, confine yourself to a role as moderator; if you chose a good question, your students will do your work for you.

You might notice a few things about this method:

It gives your own voice a much-needed rest in the middle of a long lecture :-)
Your students will actually be paying close attention.
Your students will actually be thinking. In class, no less.
As often as not, one of your students will say something particularly insightful that makes you think.

If you try it and like the results, increase the number of questions. Personally, my classes are usually about two hours, and I shoot for a goal of at least three discussion-questions per class. But if you're not used to it, you can work up to this one question at a time.

One Myth About Teaching

2008-12-30T14:48:00.002-05:00

I was confronted with the opinion the other day that teachers are overpaid because they only have to work 9 months out of the year but get paid for a full year. I'm pretty sure the person who expressed this opinion has never actually met a teacher before, but it seemed like a thought that a lot of people might have. So, I thought I'd set the record straight.

First, a teacher in any field typically gets paid a bit less than a working professional in that field, even though they have to know just as much (if not more). This is why a lot of teachers feel underpaid for their work -- because with their qualifications, they could make more if they weren't teaching.

As for being underworked, I know of very few teachers who sit idle on summer/winter break. In my own experience, the time fills up fast:

There's a lot of prep work to do for classes before they start: revising syllabi and course content, evaluating new textbooks, and keeping current with industry trends all take time.
If you're teaching any brand new courses, you have to develop everything from scratch, which typically takes about as much time as teaching the course itself (i.e. one new course = two old courses, in terms of time commitment).
Keeping professional skills sharp is important. Over breaks I usually end up doing some kind of freelance contract work.
Ever heard of summer and winter classes? A lot of teachers hold classes over these supposed "break" periods.
And of course, during the academic year teaching is a lot more than just a 9-to-5 job. In theory you're supposed to have a 40-hour work week, which is 4 or 5 classes if you're full time (that includes face time in lecture or lab, and also out-of-class time spent grading). But in addition to that, you have other duties: academic advising, office hours, faculty meetings, and (if you're really unlucky) being on a committee.

In reality, teaching is more than a full-time job.

Does that mean that these thoughts of "lazy" teachers who only work "30 weeks out of the year" are completely inaccurate? Unfortunately, no. It is possible to reduce the workload. You can hold office hours for your classes simultaneously, and then use the time to get other work done if no students show up (although this means you'll end up treating students like they're interrupting you when they show up for scheduled office hours). You can just copy your course notes from earlier classes without updating them, which reduces prep time to almost zero (but then you cheat your students out of a modern education). You can set up your assignments so that they're easy to grade (but anything easy to grade is usually not that meaningful -- for example, you can tell a lot more about a student's understanding by reading an essay than you can get from a multiple-choice question, but multiple-choice is easier to grade).

So, it is possible to have lots of time off, work 40 (or fewer) hours per week for 30 weeks a year, and have the rest of the time free to... um... do whatever teachers do when they're not working. But so far, the only way I've found to do that is to cheat your students. If you want to be a good teacher, forget any thoughts you had of annual three-month vacations...

About youth being wasted on the young

2008-12-22T11:02:00.004-05:00

It may be too early to tell, but already I see a cycle emerging:

At first, many bright-eyed hopeful students want nothing more than to make the next generation of AAA games. In their spare time, they play certain games obsessively, and it is these games in particular (or others just like them) that they'd like to make.
Some of these students graduate, get into industry and enjoy it for a time, but eventually get frustrated. They're a small cog in a huge machine, going from one crunch period to another, with no end in sight. In their spare time, they play short games because that's all they have time for, and they secretly wish they were Jason Rohrer or Rod Humble or Jenova Chen.
Some of these frustrated developers leave the industry for academia, and are frankly amazed at how much of an opportunity the next generation of students has. Why, they could use their talents to make the next big art game that has all of the professional developers collectively salivating at its brilliance! These students have the time, they have the skills, they've got the drive... but all they want to do is make a clone of their favorite AAA titles. Oh, the tragedy of wasted opportunity!

And then the cycle repeats.

I do my best to describe this to my students. In a few cases, they get it. Most of the time, it's like trying to describe working in an office job to a second-grader: the life experience necessary for total comprehension just isn't there yet.

I see other teachers forcing the issue. I hear at GDC of class assignments that involve having students create games that teach, games that inform, games that enlighten, games that have a positive social impact, games that make the world a better place, games that express an emotion (other than power fantasy or adrenaline rush), and so on. These kinds of assignments are a reflection of the instructor's agenda: these are the kinds of games that the teacher wants to make.

If you're a student, looking at the game design assignments heaped on you will give you a clue as to the kinds of things you might really want to make yourself in five to ten years (even if they seem arbitrary or meaningless right now). If nothing else, it shows you how your instructor -- the same person who wanted to make nothing but AAA games back when they were your age, if you can believe it -- has changed over time.

But it is a real shame that a lot of students today won't figure all of this out until it's too late. George Bernard Shaw's quote about youth being wasted on the young is ringing true.

Emergent Design: Paper Prototyping of Aiming/Hit Mechanics

2008-12-16T21:40:00.004-05:00

Just a quick tip today from one of my earlier game design classes (we actually came up with this as a group in the middle of class while critiquing a student project):

If you're designing a paper prototype for a digital game and one of the core mechanics involves accurate positioning (examples include aiming in an FPS, positioning a paddle in a ball-and-paddle game, or maneuvering an avatar through an obstacle course), flicking a coin on a flat surface towards a target gives a reasonable approximation.

In our particular case, the student was designing a ball-and-paddle game. We discovered that if the coin was the paddle and a single flick was your allotted movement (then you repositioned the ball), it had the realistic property that it was much easier to hit a ball coming right at you than one that was landing halfway across the screen.

For an excellent example of this mechanic in action, see the non-digital game Pitch Car. Okay, so it's not Gran Turismo... but it could easily be the basis for a non-digital version of Mario Kart.

Where Do Game Ideas Come From?

2008-12-13T23:02:00.004-05:00

A recent article by fellow teacher/designer Lewis Pulsipher got me thinking about game ideas. A lot of students appear to assume all core concepts start like this:
"It's just like this other game that I like, only with these other elements added that I also like!"

In the real world, games are rarely made that way. There are all kinds of constraints that get a designer started. Some examples:

A publisher issues an RFP for a sequel to an earlier game, now that the original developers are out of business.
A publisher acquires the rights to a licensed IP and asks for concepts using that IP.
A publisher notices there are no announced titles in a certain popular genre within a certain fiscal quarter a couple years from now. You start with a genre, timeline and budget which are all written in stone, but you're free to be original otherwise.
A publisher notices a fast-growing, underserved player demographic and asks you to make a game to specifically attract that demographic (such as the notorious "games for girls" phase that the industry seems determined to screw up about once every ten years).
An educational/training company approaches you, asking you to make a game to teach a given set of content more effectively than traditional classroom study.
A political organization commissions a persuasive game to push a specific agenda or raise awareness of an important issue.
An indie developer wants to make an "art game" to express their own emotional struggle through gameplay.

I've found the best way to break students of their habit is to introduce them to a variety of real-world constraints, giving them practice in designing games to those imposed constraints. Because game ideas may come from all over, but the ones that get made into AAA games usually come from constraints imposed from above.

Required Playing

2008-12-07T13:49:00.002-05:00

A recent conversation I had reminded me of something, which I share with you now.

Students of any artistic medium should are expected to study the more famous/important works within that medium. A graduate of a film school who had never heard of Citizen Kane, a graduate of an art school who couldn't recognize the work of Van Gogh, or a graduate of a creative writing program who never read Shakespeare would all be considered rather embarassing to their schools. So, it's up to the school to make sure their students get exposure to the great works of their field. So it should be with the study of video game design.

Let's assume for the purpose of this exercise that a teacher can find some way to gain access to any game, regardless of technical constraints. Let's also assume that there are no time constraints, and "how do I fit all of this in the core curriculum?" is someone else's problem.

The question: if you were to make a list of games that all students of game design should know about, what games would be on that list? This should mostly involve games that did at least one thing really well or poorly with respect to game design (not technology or art), i.e. those games that we should be able to learn something from. The games that, intentionally or not, made some contribution to the field of game design.

Here's my own list, so far:

Classic Non-digital: Chess, Go, and at least one card game featuring trick-taking and trump (Spades, Bridge, Whist, etc.)

Modern Non-digital: Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons (at least read the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide)

Arcade: at least one ball-and-paddle game (Pong, Breakout, Arkanoid), at least one LaserDisc game (Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, etc.), Pac Man, Gauntlet, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter 2, at least one side-scrolling shooter (Gradius, R-Type, etc.), Tetris

PC: at least one Roguelike (Rogue, Nethack, Angband), Archon, any game from the Civilization series, Warcraft 2, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Star Control 2, Ultima IV

Console: Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, any game from the Pokemon series, any game from the Harvest Moon series, any cart-racing game (Mario Kart, etc.), any realistic racing game (Gran Turismo, etc.), at least one side-scrolling adventure game (Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, etc.), any tactical RPG (Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, etc.), any modern Western RPG (Knights of the Old Republic, Oblivion, etc.), any modern Eastern RPG (Final Fantasy, etc.), any modern 3D platformer (Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, etc.)

Feel free to post arguments against any from the above list, or any games not on the list that you'd add.

What comes first, theory or practice?

2008-12-02T21:12:00.002-05:00

The first year I taught game design, I taught two game design courses: a fully practical one where students were given realistic game design problems (e.g. "Develop a core concept and one-page concept doc with brief description, genre, target audience, target platform, and feature list for a given IP") and a fully theoretical one where students read about the leading thoughts in the field and discuss them.

Because of administrative snafus, the practical course was taught first. Students loved the challenge, but once they got to the theory course the (predictable) reaction was: this is great, why couldn't you have told us this stuff before when we could have actually used it?

The next year, I vowed to teach the theory first, and then the students could use this strong foundational understanding of the field to go on and make excellent game projects in a practical class that followed. I ran into a different problem: without the practice of making real games, the students weren't nearly as interested. Sure, I can talk about MDA or flow theory or positive feedback loops all day long and not get tired, but the students had no easy way to contextualize all of this. Yes, I can give practical examples from real games, and that is part of it... but without having done a lot of design work themselves, the students had a lot more trouble seeing it.

Chicken. Egg. Gah! I can't win! Or can I?

This Winter, I'll be trying a third approach: combining the two into one course, alternating the theory with the practice so that we first go over a small bit of theory and then immediately apply it in a real design situation. I look forward to seeing how this goes.

It occurs to me there is a potential fourth approach: also a combined course, but with the practice first... then followed by discussion. This has the downside that students are less likely to produce anything of value (after all, I'm not teaching them how until after each assignment is over) but it should make the discussions much more valuable: we can talk about what went right or wrong on each project, and then comment on how current theories play into it all. I may try that in a future iteration.

Topic for Discussion: Who is the Thomas Kinkade of Game Design?

2008-11-17T23:20:00.004-05:00

This came up in discussion with another designer the other day (after a comment along the lines of more game design students these days being familiar with Thomas Kinkade than Reiner Knizia). I thought it would be an interesting open question to repost here.

If you're unfamiliar with Thomas Kinkade, he is one of the more (in)famous painters alive today. You might want to read his Wikipedia entry here to put yourself in the right frame of mind to consider this question.

The question: to the extent that game design is an art form, what game designer is the equivalent of Thomas Kinkade? Or, more succinctly:

Painting : Thomas Kinkade :: Game Design : ???

Some people might consider the label "Kinkade of Games" to be a great compliment. Others might consider it a grave insult. For this reason, I won't hold it against anyone if they choose to comment anonymously.

Art Critics

2008-11-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

I recently had occasion to go back and read Roger Ebert's claim that video games could never be art due to the inherent limitations in the medium, his further rebuttal to Clive Barker, and the resulting article from game designer Clint Hocking.

At the time, I thought this was a relatively new argument. Games are a new medium, after all. Today, I realize that all of this haggling over what is or isn't "art" (or "high art" or "fine art" if you prefer) is nearly a century old. At least.

Ebert's arguments essentially boil down to this:

I am going to make a list of criteria by which art should be judged.
Games cannot be judged by this criteria, due to the nature of the medium.
Ergo, games are not and can never be art.

Here's the thing: there was an art critic named Clement Greenberg who was highly influential in the art world in the 1930s and 40s, who basically did exactly the same thing for modern art. He wrote some highly influential essays that essentially gave a list of criteria for judging art. And for awhile, his ideas were followed almost religiously to decide what was good or bad art, and even what was and wasn't art in the first place.

Then, the so-called Postmodern movement came along and basically said "screw this, art can be more than Greenberg's one narrow slice of representation." All of a sudden, there was a trickle and then an explosion of art that looked absolutely nothing like Greenberg's ideal modern art. But the new stuff was still, clearly, art. The Postmodern charge was led by another art critic, Harold Rosenberg.

So, two artist critics already figured out the correct argument for why games can be art... about half a century ago. A few years ago we re-enacted the old debate, with Ebert playing the part of Greenberg and Hocking playing Rosenberg, but the arguments are essentially the same.

If I had known this back in 2005, I could have written an influential essay on the subject. Today, there are so many art games that I think such an essay is unnecessary. But I still find it interesting how we retread old ground without realizing.

What Happens After Graduation?

2008-11-05T19:50:00.000-05:00

Having encountered a few former students recently, I was reminded of something that I think every student should know:

This is a hard industry to find your first job. There's a reason it's called "breaking in."

This usually hits home about 3 to 6 months after graduation. The student (well, no longer a student) applies to a bunch of game companies, only to either get rejections or dead silence. And then comes the self-doubt: am I not finding a job because there's something wrong with me? Am I not as qualified as I thought I was? If I'll make such a great game developer, why won't anyone hire me? Maybe I should've listened to Uncle Roy and gone into insurance.

Making it through that period is important. Once you're through, there comes a redoubling of effort: I just have to try harder. I'll apply to more places, and start looking for new opportunities that I might have missed. I'll call back those places I haven't heard from, just to check on things. I'll go back to the websites of the companies I was interested in and see if any new positions opened up since a few months ago.

And then on some idle Thursday, you get that call. And maybe it's your dream position that you thought was lost, and maybe it's QA at some local no-name casual games company, but at that point you've got what you were after: your first industry job.

Granted, it doesn't happen like this for everyone. Some students are lucky enough to line up employment before they even graduate. But I've seen the scenario above more often than not (and not just with my students, either), and it's worth a reminder that this is not a poor reflection on the student... it's part of the process.

So...

If you're a student about to graduate (or recently graduated): bookmark this post, and return to it when you're looking for that first job and everything seems so elusive. Remind yourself that it's not you, it's the industry. So buckle down and try harder, and keep trying until you get a job.

If you're a student who won't graduate for awhile: remember that this can happen, and plan accordingly. Make sure you've got some way to support yourself for awhile after you graduate, if you have trouble finding a job making games. Take care of food/water/shelter first, and realize that finding game-related work can sometimes take awhile.

If you're a teacher: remind your students of this every now and then. It's easy to forget, but it's important to remember.

Fighting Designer's Block

2008-10-31T10:00:00.000-04:00

I recently attended an online seminar called "Creativity Coaching" (sorry, I can't find a link to it), billed as, essentially, a method for overcoming creative blocks -- whether you're a writer, artist, game designer, or some other creative type.

The practical upshot is this: it's easy to be creative when you're passionate about what you do, but it gets harder when the creativity is forced or mandated on a project that you're not particularly excited about. You might come up with dozens of story ideas for a fantasy RPG every day, but that doesn't mean you can churn out a bunch of help text for Career Mode in Madden 2009 with the same gusto.

If you're in a situation where you feel like you have to do a task rather than wanting to do it, you're at risk for becoming creatively blocked. (This is true for students as much as professionals. In both cases you're often asked to do something that feels arbitrary or tedious to you.)

The solution is to find that passion again. Remember the reason why you love your field in the first place, and go do that for a bit. If you're a game designer, spend a weekend making a short game, as in a Game Jam. If you're an artist doing commercial work, do a personal art project on the side. Basically, do something creative for yourself and not for money or a job, on your own time. I realize that if you're in the middle of crunch, this isn't always the easiest thing to do. But perhaps that's just one more reason for companies to avoid crunch in the first place, if they want to keep their people in top creative form.

Students who Know Everything

2008-10-19T10:14:00.000-04:00

If you're teaching a class on rocket science or brain surgery, your students are probably not going to enter your classroom thinking that your class is a waste of time, or that they know more than you about your subject.

Mostly, this is true for game design as well (as long as you, as the teacher, have enough credentials to convince your students that you really do know more than them). But game design is one of those fields that everyone thinks they can do, because it looks so easy... so eventually, if you teach game design, you'll encounter a student who is convinced they know something you don't. You say something in class, and they contradict you, right there in front of the rest of the class. They insist that you're wrong, they tell you exactly why. You state your case for why you're saying what you are, but they aren't swayed. The class polarizes, with you on one side and this student on the other, and neither of you apparently willing to compromise.

And of course, game design is a living field, with varying opinions on all sides of just about any topic. So who's to say that you are right? But then, if you're not, how can you be teaching a class where you don't know the right answers... or where there might even be no right answers?

How do you deal with that?

If the point you're arguing about is actually interesting and you can think of any value in continuing, involve the rest of the class. Ask for opinions. Get a discussion going. Some of my best class moments were completely unplanned: a student once asked which was better, save points or save-anywhere, which launched the whole class into a wonderful hour-long digression that was far more valuable than the stuff written in my lesson plans. In addition to the topic itself, your students also learn how designers discuss problems in the field, whether it's in a classroom or a GDC roundtable.

If the student is hung up on some pointless minutiae like the exact definition of a positive feedback loop, exit the discussion. Defer: "I'd be happy to talk with you more about that after class today or during my office hours, but I don't want to get too caught on this one detail. We have a lot of other things to cover today, so how about you give me the benefit of the doubt and pretend that what I've just said is right, just so we can continue to talk about the other topics in class today, and we can look it up later. Does that sound reasonable?" (Bonus tip: If you ask "does that sound reasonable?" about anything, no matter how unreasonable, the other person will probably agree. Most people find it really hard to tell you to your face that you're being unreasonable when you ask.)

Warning: If you defer, make sure to follow up. Otherwise, you give the impression that you're just trying to silence anyone who disagrees with you, and ideally it's better if your class is your partner in education rather than your antagonist.

If the student still keeps disagreeing, as a last resort you can pull rank. You have the authority to send a disruptive student out of the room (worst case, by calling campus security to escort them out), if the student is getting in the way of everyone else learning. I've never had things come remotely close to that extreme, though.

Whatever you do, stay calm. Remember: if a student is arguing with you about anything, it means they're passionate about your subject (enough so that they're able to overcome the intimidation of speaking out in front of a group, and speaking contrary to a teacher!). Passion is a good thing. This student's passion might be misdirected, but it's still there, and I'd say that's infinitely better than a student who is bored, doesn't care about your subject at all, and just sits in the back quietly (or doesn't even bother to show up to class). So, consider it a victory if your students are confrontational... it means you're reaching them.

One important difference between Game Design and Contemporary Art

2008-10-16T10:34:00.000-04:00

I have a confession to make. Having gone on record as saying that all game designers should study art, I've never actually taken a course on studying art until just now. (I did take a course as an undergrad where we created art using a computer, but I'd never heard of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Robert Mapplethorpe until recently. This is the point at which any artists in the audience are rolling their eyes, wondering how I got as far as I did... and everyone else is wondering what the heck I'm talking about.)

Now that I'm studying contemporary art, I'm seeing a lot of similarities between art and game design. In particular, the art world has already encountered a number of issues in the past 100 years that video games are only beginning to struggle with today. I'm sure I'll post more about that in the future.

Today, though, I want to talk about one of the few big differences between art and games. It has to do with accessibility.

When most people today see a piece in a contemporary art museum or gallery, their first reaction is: "huh? I don't get it." The reason is that a lot of art isn't trying to talk directly to laypeople; it's artists talking to other artists. If you're an artist and you want to say something about the quality or nature or meaning of art, you don't give a lecture at an art convention, nor do you write an article for an online magazine about art; you create a piece of art that states your viewpoint. And other artists and critics who are already familiar with the current issues and discussions in the field (and who are already familiar with you and your background, culture, and viewpoints) will immediately see your piece and understand what you're saying. It's a very efficient way to communicate, actually. You just do your work and it explains itself.

Game designers don't have this luxury. For us, improving our understanding of our craft is a separate activity from actually making games. We talk about how to make better games through articles on Gamasutra and Game Developer, we give lectures at GDC, or we just talk to people in local IGDA meetings or the like. And then when we're done talking, we go off into our own respective worlds and try to apply what we've learned.

And maybe it's because of the complexity of video games, or maybe it's because a lot of video games hide their underlying mechanics from the player, or maybe it's just that a lot of designers aren't that good at game analysis, but we don't learn much from just playing each others' games... at least, not compared with how much artists get from looking at their contemporaries' works.

Here's an example: suppose you're making a CCG and you want to know the relationship between drawing an extra card and having the opponent discard a card (both of which give the player a one-card advantage). I can tell you from experience that the discard is usually more powerful (by a factor of about 1.5x), unless your game has really weird mechanics. But if you just looked at a variety of CCGs, this isn't something that you'd see plainly. Sometimes it's downright obscure, because cards often have different cost structures, or combine things like drawing and discarding with other effects (which makes for more interesting cards, but also obscures the basic costs and benefits and relative values of the simple things). So, unlike an artist, I can't just stare at the work of fellow game designers to learn how they do what they do. And unlike an artist, I can't just make a great game and have it speak for itself, to the point that other designers will just universally "get it" and be able to make their own games better.

But then, this limitation is also a strength of games when it comes to the mass market. If you haven't studied games, if you've never taken a game criticism or game analysis course, you can still sit down and play a game and have a good time with it (even if you don't understand why you enjoy it so much). But if you haven't studied art, and you go to an art museum, most of the stuff in there will likely go over your head. So, the communication between game designers may not be as efficient as that of painters or sculptors... but on the other hand, more people can appreciate and interact with a game than a painting or sculpture.

Using Games in Homework Assignments

2008-10-12T21:30:00.000-04:00

A lot of my assignments involve either the study of games (sometimes within certain constraints, like games from a certain time period or genre or platform). There are a lot of challenges here. A few pitfalls I've run into and my solutions:

Assignment: Analyze a game from a particular genre.
Problem: Students unfamiliar with the genre will have a difficult time, since they have to research not only the game but the genre as well; this is often accompanied by a perception of unfairness or bias.
Solution: Cover a variety of genres over the course, so that every student will have a few assignments that are easier and others that are harder. Students who aren't hardcore gamers may still feel at a disadvantage. Another solution is to give links or documents that explain the basics of the genre for the uninitiated; you may have to put these together yourself, which is more work.

Assignment: Analyze a game of your choice.
Problem: Even with my pretty extensive knowledge of video-game trivia, about half of the assignments will involve games I'm not familiar with. I then need to research all these games, which is fascinating and educational but also takes time that I often don't have.
Solution: Give a list of a dozen or so games that you're personally familiar with. Choose a variety that are well-known, so that the vast majority of students will have at least one that they already know. For students who complain that they don't know any of the games, you can negotiate with them after class to find a game that both of you know.

Assignment: Analyze this specific game.
Problem: Students unfamiliar with the game will complain, as with a specific genre.
Solution: Choose a game that is sufficiently obscure that none of your students have played it. This is relatively easy if you're studying classic games from before 1985 or so, as most of your students were not alive then :). It's also possible with more modern niche games. In this case, researching the game is considered part of the assignment.
Alternate solution: Time permitting, bring the game in question to class and do a demo and some preliminary analysis in class. Bonus points if you can put the game "on reserve" at your campus library or otherwise make it something that students can play for themselves on their own time.

Lessons learned from SIEGE

2008-10-08T19:13:00.001-04:00

SIEGE was an interesting experience for me this year. I learned a lot of valueable lessons, many of them related to life and career more than actually making games. Observations:

If you get a group of programmers together, they will quietly take notes. A group of artists will sit in their chairs doodling. A group of designers will loudly interact, debate and argue. (Corollary: never schedule a group of programmers to be in an adjoining or shared space with a group of designers, whether you're organizing a conference or putting together next semester's class schedule.)

If the conference session you're moderating has the word "Improv" in the title, any number of things can go horribly wrong -- you run out of time, you have to get moved to a different room, you decide to change what you're doing in mid-presentation, whatever -- and participants will assume it's all part of the act, and applaud your brilliance.

When a game designer (or student) first starts trying to define why games are "fun" they have trouble even conceptualizing it beyond "I know it when I see it." Then they encounter Csikszentmihalyi's Flow and/or Koster's Theory of Fun and have this huge epiphany: Eureka, all fun comes from learning a new skill! Then after awhile, they enter another stage of questioning this: wait a minute, if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren't students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A's in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material? Why is sex fun (by some standards), and yet doesn't involve mastery (ahem, again by some standards)? At any rate, you could think of this as three stages of evolution of a game designer, and different designers are going to be in different stages, and when they encounter one another there will be chaos when they start discussing the nature of "fun."

Another evolution happens during the career path of a game designer. At the beginning, you take whatever work you can get. Mediocre Sequel 2: The Safe Publisher Bet? Sure, I'll take it -- anything to be able to say I worked on a published title. This continues for awhile. In late career (I suspect this is when your published title count gets into the high teens, but it varies with how interesting your random projects have been until then, and it does require you to have worked on at least one brilliant title), you start to realize that your name is now its own IP, and that working on additional failures actually hurts rather than helps you at this point. And for the first time, you start turning down work because you're afraid of harming your own reputation (as opposed to some other reason).

Technical artists -- those rare people who know both art and programming -- are worth their weight in gold to a development team. At the same time, many technical artists are not particularly strong in either art or programming. I'm sure there's a corollary here, but I haven't yet figured out what.

If you start playing any Eurogame in the hallway at a game development conference, you will soon have more spectators than players. (At one point we actually had more spectators than the heavy-metal band down the hall who were playing the themes to Mega Man 2 in realtime as someone else was doing a speedrun, live. Apparently, Reiner Knizia is geekier than Capcom.)

Speaking at SIEGE

2008-10-03T07:57:00.002-04:00

Through a series of random last-minute circumstances, I'll be going down to Siege this weekend. In particular, I'll be running a session with Brenda called "Game Design Improv" which is a series of hands-on game design exercises inspired by our book.

In between sessions, I'll be hanging out with other developers and academics, and possibly meeting some fellow students in the online classes I'm taking. If you happen to be in the Atlanta area, feel free to track me down and say hi!

Everything I Learned About Teaching, I Learned From My Field

2008-09-28T20:08:00.000-04:00

I talk a lot here about how teaching is really just a special case of game design, and how so many skills transfer over from one to the other. I changed my mind. Sort of.

At a recent teaching workshop, I witnessed about twenty fellow teachers give short presentations on teaching (and they all taught different subjects, everything from English to Calculus to Welding to Phlebotomy) and I was able to learn something from each of them.

Afterwards, I talked to someone who taught Comedy Writing and realized that she could easily give a workshop on "how to use comedy in the classroom" -- after all, comedy is a great icebreaker, it engages students, and it gets them to relax and enjoy the material. It's broadly applicable to any subject, so any teacher should be able to learn something about this field and take it with them back to their classes to make them more engaging. Of course, I've said the same thing about using game design in a classroom. How many other subjects could you say this about?

And as I thought some more, I realized the answer is probably all of them. Every subject has its own specialized knowledge that could be useful in a broader context. Consider:

Welders and carpenters and machinists learn about safety first, before they even get to touch any power tools. These people could easily walk into a class and point out any number of safety issues that would be invisible to the rest of us. Making sure your students don't hurt themselves in your class by, say, tripping and falling over a poorly-placed wire is certainly something that would be useful. (Not to mention the importance of planning before you begin any project, such as a lesson plan.)
Statisticians and mathematicians can draw a lot of really cool inferences from numbers, like taking the mean, median and standard deviation of test scores and using the information to figure out where the class is having the most trouble. Wouldn't it be great for any teacher to know, after an exam (if not before!), what topics their students are struggling with... without having to even ask?
Computer programmers and engineers are great at taking a complex task and breaking it down into simple tasks... the same way that a teacher developing a new course needs to take overarching course goals and learning objectives and break them down into day-by-day sub-goals and mini-objectives.
Medical technicians have to deal with people in a friendly yet professional manner. So do teachers, except we call our customers students instead of patients. (Some of our other customers, we call deans and department chairs. It's useful to deal with them friendly and professionally as well.)
Businesspeople and managers have to monitor, predict and direct the behavior of a lot of people at once. So do teachers.

It seems to me that any field has something to bring to the table.

So, I no longer see education and game design as inherently linked. Instead, I see education as a field that overlaps with and touches every other field. Including game design. And since games are my field, that one particular overlap is the one that I'll happily continue to blog and write and speak about. But in the meantime, I would be perfectly happy if folks from other fields would follow suit and let me know what I can learn about teaching from them.

2nd Ohio Game Jam: Results

2008-09-22T23:28:00.003-04:00

I coordinated the second Ohio Game Jam this past weekend. I didn't make a game myself, although I did assist all the teams in very minor ways, so I got to see a little bit of everything. As such, I probably learned as much as any participant.

Lessons learned about running a Game Jam:

Event planning is a lot harder than I thought it was. Last year, everything just fell into place, and there was a minimum of hassle. This year, it seemed like everything was an uphill battle, from finding a venue (which had to be changed last-minute due to a large-scale power outage) to recruiting participants (since I don't have reliable web hosting for the Ohio Game Jam website right now). For anyone else thinking about hosting a game jam, start planning at least a few months in advance and come up with contingency plans for everything. Hopefully the up-front work will be wasted and things will run smoothly for you, but if they don't then you'll be more prepared than I was.
Things to take care of (either through soliciting donations/sponsors, providing yourself, or asking participants to bring their own): physical space; computers; open work space (for designing on paper); physical prototyping materials (blank paper, lined paper, graph paper, pens and pencils, and anything else you have on hand); food and drink; sleeping space (preferably with no light); and a large area where all participants can gather (for introductions at the beginning, and presentation of work at the end).

Lessons learned about game development:

It's impossible to understate the importance of rapid prototyping. All three teams knew about this already, and yet they all made the mistake of trying to implement the complete game mechanics in one go, leaving them all with only 4 to 6 hours of time after "first playable." It's very easy to say that it's important to have something up and running really quickly, and quite another to actually do it; defining the minimum functionality set for playability is a skill, and one that not all designers are strong at.
Corollary: trade off everything for speed when doing a rapid prototype. For artists, no need to have polished art when a stick figure works just as well for playtesting, and can be done in five seconds. For programmers, all that stuff about proper code structure and good commenting and re-use and maintainability that was drilled into you in every CS class you ever took... all of that goes out the window, because it takes extra time to make your code readable, and time is the one thing you don't have.
Save early and often and back up. Sounds obvious, but one team had a computer crash that caused them to lose about an hour of work... when there was only 45 minutes to go before development ended.
If you have a programmer shortage on your team, don't design a game that requires complicated game logic or AI. If you have more than one programmer, choose a development tool that allows you to work on code concurrently (two teams used Game Maker, which is hideously bad at merging two projects, for all of its other benefits).
Game development experience helps in a game jam... but not much. Looking at the output of the teams, you wouldn't be able to tell which ones had industry professionals and which did not. (When I participated in a Game Jam, I noticed the same thing; I don't feel like my own project was any better for all of my experience, which is humbling.) I'm not sure why this is; perhaps, for all the benefits of field experience, lack of sleep ends up being the ultimate equalizer.

For those who are curious, here's the rundown of what happened at the event:
We had 13 people working in 3 teams, with a total of one game per team created (3 games total).
I gave teams a dual constraint: first, choose a social issue and create a game to spread awareness of that issue; second, design the game to be propagated through a social network like Facebook. As long as we're making games, we may as well try to save the world, right?

One team tackled the issue of financial responsibility and personal spending habits. The core concept was that people have two stats, Money and Happiness, and that there is a tradeoff where spending too much money on luxury goods causes you to run out of money (which makes your happiness go way down), but of course spending no money at all on luxuries also causes happiness to decrease, so the trick is to find a reasonable middle ground where there's plenty of money left over but also enough nice stuff to be happy. The game itself was a top-down scrolling game where the player's avatar wanders through a store looking for the cheapest necessity items, and maybe picking up a luxury item or two on the way. There were other AIs running around: other shoppers which were minor obstacles to work around, salesmen who would convince you to buy a luxury item against your will (while giving you minimal happiness in exchange), and thieves who would just steal money from you. The game created was incomplete, but could make use of social networking by allowing players to buy things for their friends (which increases both of their happiness) and competing with others on your friends list for achievements (most money, most happiness, fastest purchase of necessity items, etc.).

A second team examined the environment, specifically choices that governments make with regard to energy policy, in a turn-based resource-management strategy game. You control a small city with access to randomized natural resources, and choose what land to develop in what way (building hydroelectric dams over rivers, wind turbines in windy areas, solar panels, nuclear plants, etc. -- or of course you could develop the land as a commercial/housing area to attract more people to your city). You have a carbon footprint based on your population and the type of economy you have (fossil fuel-based, hybrid or pure electric), and a cap that's based on your population; if you go over your emission limit, you receive heavy fines. If you don't produce enough power for your population, you suffer blackouts and eventually you'll start losing population. You also have to balance all of this building against your available funds, of course. In Facebook, this game would also allow you to trade carbon emission credits and power with your friends, and also have leaderboards for largest city.

The third team took on the issue of child labor sweatshops. In their overhead-view action game, you played a child trying to escape from a shoe factory. You could pick up various shoes lying around each level (with tradeoffs for each: boots were powerful but slow, while flip-flops could be thrown quickly and accurately but did minimal damage). Your goal in each level was to pick up shoes and use them to knock out the adult supervisors, then talk to the kids to get information (which helped you progress in the game, and also gave you real-world information about sweatshop conditions). The game could propagate socially simply by having a high-score list, but did not include ways for different players to interact with one another otherwise.

Online Classes and Readings

2008-09-17T22:45:00.000-04:00

Most traditional classes have two kinds of learning: students attend lectures, and they have assigned reading from a textbook.

I say "and" but really for most undergrad students it's an either/or proposition. Lecture and readings are usually redundant, so the students who attend lecture tend to blow off the reading and those who diligently do the reading don't feel too bad about skipping class. This is a generalization; there are plenty of exceptions, students who attend class and study heavily, or classes where the reading and lecture have no common ground. But in a lot of cases, students are conditioned to study as little as possible, and this is an obvious shortcut that can free up some extra time for, say, playing games.

Without going into a discussion of how to change the culture of an entire generation, let's assume that this carries over into online classes and see what happens.

In the online classes I've taught before, there is no "lecture" per se; the lecture has been replaced by... more reading, which was written by whomever developed the online course. So students have reading from the course website, and assigned reading from a textbook. (Visual learners are probably quite happy about this, while auditory learners get screwed, but I digress.)

To a student who sees this parallel of "lecture == course website" the reading again becomes either/or: read the course website, or read the textbook. Naturally, the website wins, so any assigned reading from a textbook in an online class is likely to get ignored by a lot of people.

I never noticed this until recently, when I was grading an assignment for one of the online classes that I was teaching. Most of the students seemed to not understand a particular concept, the difference between constituative and operational rules from the Rules of Play text. It's a difficult concept, granted, but everyone seemed to be misunderstanding it in the same way. What's going on here? Well, I checked the course website to see what it had to say about this concept... and it just mentioned it in passing, giving a couple of examples to supplement the textbook but not really explaining it properly (probably because the course developer expected that students would do the reading). But here's the thing -- you wouldn't notice that the course website's material was supplemental unless you did the reading in the textbook! So all of these students thought they knew what was going on, even though they didn't.

This is, I think, a major hazard for online course development. Here are a few ways around it:

Warn students early and often that none of the work in the class is optional. (This probably won't work, but at least it makes it harder for students to complain when you catch them slacking.)
Force the issue. If the graded assignments directly reference parts of the reading that aren't on the course website, students will have to read at least those parts in order to complete the assignments.
Tape your lectures and put them online, instead of writing text. This requires some extra equipment and technical know-how (and not all course website packages support all kinds of video), but it does at least make it so that the students aren't just doing reading and reading and more reading. If they don't burn through their will to read on the course website, maybe they'll have a few brain cells left over that are willing to take a peek at the textbook. (Bonus: if you already teach a face-to-face class and tape it, your content is easy to develop.)

Choosing a School: Ownership

2008-09-13T21:57:00.002-04:00

Question: Who owns the IP rights to games that are created by students?

What to look for: Ideally, the students should own all copyright and other intellectual property ownership of the projects they create while they are students.

What to do: Decide if this matters to you. Some people don't care, because they aren't planning on selling anything they make as a student anyway. Some people care, but they're willing to compromise on this (maybe by just not using their favorite game ideas until after they graduate) in order to go to a school that is otherwise their choice. For some people, this is a deal-killer.

What to watch out for: Some schools explicitly state that they own all rights to all student work. Probably the most notorious example of this was Team Toblo (a good story to read for why IP ownership might matter to you as a student). Other schools do not have an official policy at all, which is a signal that they haven't thought about it yet in spite of it being a legal and PR minefield. In these cases, proceed with caution, because the rights may be legally unclear and the last thing you need as a student is to get involved in a legal battle. Still other schools have restrictions: they own the rights to anything you create using university resources (such as computer labs or printers), but a project you make on your own with your own equipment is 100% yours, so there's a way to own your work if it matters to you. Mainly, the important thing is to be aware of the official policy before it becomes an issue... and if you think the policy is suboptimal and you plan on attending anyway, consider taking it upon yourself to push for policy change.

Update 11/13/2008: The monthly IGDA column on legal issues gives some insight into IP ownership rights of student work: http://www.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Nov08.php
Thanks, Jim!

Update 11/14/2008: It appears this is becoming a much larger discussion. A recent Gamasutra article highlights the problem. This blog post is quoted and linked to in the article, alongside quotes from Tom Buscaglia, Brenda Brathwaite and Susan Gold... so I'm in good company. Maybe this will eventually become a big enough issue that the "we own your IP" schools will consider policy changes, and the schools without an official policy will get off their behinds and make their policy explicit.

Assessment and Evaluation

2008-09-10T08:15:00.000-04:00

People who study education will talk a lot about the differences and similarities between assessment and evaluation. I'll spare you the details, but basically we're dealing with the question: how do we know that learning actually takes place when a student attends a course?

The traditional response is to give the student tasks (often in the form of a final exam or project), and hope that their ability to perform well correlates with their mastery of the subject material. But there's the rub: what we measure (performance on a task) is still different from our goal (learning). There's no way to measure an abstract, transparent concept like "learning" directly, so we have to find indirect ways to take a guess.

It strikes me that there's a parallel here with game development, and metrics-based playtesting in particular. During playtesting, what we'd really like to do is know if the players are having fun, but there's no way to measure "fun" directly. So, we take measurements of things that we hope will correlate: how long did each tester spend on this level, how many players finished the game, how long was the average play session, and so on. But it's still indirect measurement.

In both cases, we still live in an imperfect world. Someone tell me when we solve one problem, because it probably means that we'll have solved the other one as soon as someone puts two and two together.

Notes from CTL

2008-09-06T12:32:00.000-04:00

I recently attended a small in-house conference held at Columbus State called Celebrate Teaching & Learning Day. I admit this is a hokey name; I mean, we do this as opposed to, what, celebrating ignorance?

I gave a presentation based heavily on my Origins seminar, tailored for an audience of teachers who may or may not actually be gamers. But that's not what this post is about. This is about the other seminars I attended and why they're relevant to teaching and/or game design.

Keynote: Dr. Mark Milliron

Normally I dislike keynotes, because they tend to be abstract and just an artificial excuse to get people excited. They remind me of pep rallies from high school. But this guy had a lot of interesting ideas, making him one of my favorite keynote speakers to date.
First big idea: the use of analytics (that is, mining a bunch of data and using it to make educated guesses about future behavior) is already an established technology -- some examples being amazon.com's ability to make pretty good guesses of other things you might like to buy whenever you click on any single item, or TiVo's ability to download TV shows you've never heard of that it thinks you'd like, or your email spam filter getting better over time the more you tell it what is and isn't spam. We need to leverage this kind of predictive modeling in academics. Wouldn't it be useful for a professor to receive this email: "Based on past behavior, here is a list of students who might be thinking of dropping your class next week."? Wouldn't it be useful for a student to receive this email: "You seem to be having trouble with this particular concept. Other students who have similar problems have found the following resources useful."?
Second big idea: using the power of open-source to improve teaching. Pointed us to OERCommons.org, which is essentially Wikipedia for instructors. (Unfortunately, there are currently no learning objects for game design. But if you teach Biology or English or something, you're in luck.)
Amusing quote: "Most people who use PowerPoint have neither power, nor a point."

"Sage on the Stage to Edutainer": Dr. Bill Dross

Three different ways that people learn: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. Any given class will probably be split evenly between them. This is probably not news to experienced teachers, but it certainly has applications for game design (e.g. don't just have a page of scrolling text when it's possible to add voice and pictures; see if you can add an icon to each menu item so that they aren't just text; include subtitles for voice, and visual effects to match audio cues).
In the classroom, you can help auditory learners by recording your own lectures and making them available as podcasts. (If you don't know how... ask your students!)
Likewise, you can use audio or video recordings during class time. In particular, it's expensive and not always practical for students to attend GDC, but you can at least download some sessions from GDC Radio and make them available on your course website.
There is a concept in the field of education called "discovery learning" which is when students do research and learning on their own, relatively undirected (similar to a self-paced course, or doing work on a portfolio piece). I see a direct analogy between discovery learning and open-world games like GTA or Oblivion... and a similar analogy between structured lecture and on-rails RPGs. (This all makes me wonder how much information you can get about a student's preferred learning style, simply by asking them what their favorite games are.)
I use a lot of informal discussion in my classes, but some professors prefer formal debate (which I haven't tried, but now I want to). The idea is to present a controversial issue, and randomly assign students to either be "pro" or "con" (so, students may be arguing something they don't personally believe). Pro always speaks first, then Con (for only a couple of minutes each -- no interruptions allowed by the other side); then Pro and Con again to rebut each others' arguments; then a short break for each side to regroup; then a summary from each side; and then you can determine a winner (perhaps by a randomly-selected panel of students who are made judges instead of speakers). Examples of topics that I'd like to try this method with: government regulation of the game industry, the importance of diversity in the workplace, narratology vs. ludology, or whether the proliferation of sequels and licenses is good or bad for the industry.

"Hybrid Courses: The Best of Both Worlds?" (various speakers)

I'd never heard of "hybrid" courses before. Apparently these are courses that are half face-to-face, half online (with half the number of normal contact hours in a classroom). Does that mean that they're a mostly face-to-face class with some extra online content? A mostly-online class with a little bit of face time? An entirely new type of class that has some elements of online and face-to-face and some parts all its own? At this point, the concept is new enough that it varies from class to class, which leads to student confusion.
Best way to avoid this is to make expectations clear up front -- preferably in the course catalog, and repeated at the start of class.
If you want to draw a parallel between hybrid courses and development of hybrid-genre games, be my guest.

Game Jams!

2008-09-03T21:22:00.002-04:00

Game Jams are great; I'm a huge fan of them. (Roughly defined, a Game Jam is an event where individuals or small teams work together to develop a complete game or working prototype from scratch in a short period of time, typically one or two days.) You get about as much insight into the game development process in a weekend as you'd normally get in a three-year AAA development cycle. You get to experiment with new tools, processes, or designs in a risk-free setting (after all, even if you fall flat on your face, all you've lost is a weekend... and think of the wisdom gained that would normally cost millions of publisher dollars). You get to meet and work with new people you haven't met before. For students, it's about the best practical experience you can get outside of class. For educators, it gives the kind of insight that's hard to get when you're not working in the industry full-time. For working professionals, it offers the opportunity to grow professionally and hone your skills in a way that's normally not possible when you're in the middle of a development grind.

For those of you in or near Columbus, Ohio, the second Ohio Game Jam is scheduled for the weekend of September 20-21 (starting at 2pm on Saturday and going until roughly 4pm Sunday). Since there's limited space, I'm trying to get a head count ahead of time, so I'll send the location to people who RSVP by email to ai864 at yahoo dot com. Feel free to pass on this info to anyone else you know in the area. The event is free, and open to all ages and skill levels.

For those of you not in Columbus but still somewhere on Planet Earth, there's also the Global Game Jam, a 48-hour event starting at 5pm Friday, January 30, 2009 (in your local time zone). This event is many Game Jams happening concurrently at a number of sites around the globe. More info will be added to the website in the coming months, once the list of host venues is finalized. Contact info is on the Global Game Jam website.

Textbook Review: Challenges for Game Designers

2008-09-01T11:45:00.005-04:00

"Challenges for Game Designers" (Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber)

So, it's finally printed and in circulation, and you can buy it now. This is the best textbook ever, and all of you should adopt it for all your classes and buy extra copies from your friends.

Okay, so I'm one of the authors. What, you expect an unbiased review?

This book came about because some people on IGDA's Game_Edu list were complaining that they'd love to have students design games, but they either don't have access to computers or their students don't know programming. Brenda and I were both, like, WTF? You don't need any polygons to play Chess. You don't need any lines of code to play Go. You don't need a development team and millions of dollars to make Settlers of Catan, you just need one guy and five bucks' worth of dice and index cards. So, we decided to write a book about making games without computers.

The original idea was just to take a bunch of exercises that we'd both done in our classes, sets of constraints that serve as starting points. (For example, some of my former students still shudder in horror of the time when I had them create a game concept document based on the Care Bears IP after we studied the use of licenses in games.) Before too long, though, we realized it would be unfair to just give these exercises without any help -- it's fine and good for people who are designers already, but to tell a beginning student they should create a full proposal without telling them how is just unfair. So we added a bit of "how-to"... which incidentally made the book take about three times as long to write, but hopefully a lot easier to understand.

The book is 21 chapters, though one of those is just the introduction to the book. The other twenty all have five exercises each (with a full description of deliverables and suggested process), plus another ten "shorts" (quick ideas to get you started or inspired), for a total of 300 game design exercises... none of which requires any art or programming skill at all (although if you do have programming or art skills and want to take your non-digital design and make a digital game out of it, most of these exercises can be used as a starting point).

Students: If you'd like to design games but don't know where to begin, this should be a reasonable starting point.

Instructors: I expect this to be a good companion to a theory-based textbook like Game Design Workshop. Theory is necessary and all, but at some point anyone learning game design must sit down and design games (lots and lots of games), and Challenges for Game Designers is very practical in nature. You could either combine the two in a single course, or teach an introductory theory-based course to give the basic concepts and then offer a follow-up practical course. I happen to think students would understand more if the theory and practice were combined so that the theories make sense and are contextual, rather than just some abstract thoughts that are meaningless until six months later.

Professionals: When Brenda and I worked at Cyberlore, there was a time when we'd have weekly design department meetings (we worked with two other designers). Once a month, we would use the meeting time to do a design exercise; one of us would be responsible for developing the constraints, and the others would struggle with the problem. It was a way to keep our design skills sharp, and it was one of the few times in the business world where you'd hear people say that they were actually looking forward to attending a meeting. I also ran a couple of these exercises over lunch and invited programmers, artists, and anyone else who had an interest in game design; people had fun, and also gained an understanding of the kinds of things we designers did all day. If you work with other designers (or other people who are interested in game design), we designed this book to be useful in these kinds of skill-building meetings and workshops.

Textbook Review: Teaching Videogames

2008-08-27T15:18:00.003-04:00

It's been awhile since I did one of these. I just got a new shipment in, but I chose this one first because it was short.

"Teaching Videogames" (Barney Oram & James Newman)

It may seem strange to call this a "textbook" since it's targeted at teachers and not students, but it's a book on teaching and games so of course I had to take a look. It's written by two people with no game industry credits that I could see, it's barely large enough at 88 pages to qualify as a book (at that size it's more like an oversized pamphlet), and they're charging $42.95 for it, so I wasn't in a particularly generous mood when I started reading.

To be clear, this is not a book on game development. It's a book on game studies. This wasn't clear to me from the title, although I suppose being part of the "Teaching Film and Media Studies" series of books (as shown on the cover) should have been a big hint.

What exactly is this book about? It appears to be a primer on games (in the context of media studies) for those unfortunate souls who teach media studies courses, somehow found themselves tasked with teaching a class on video game studies, and feel completely lost because they don't know the first thing about video games. For those people, this book offers an overview of games and the game industry: a brief history of the industry, important types of businesses (developers, publishers, retailers, etc.), ludology and narratology, women in games, and violence in games and its effect on society. It offers workable syllabi for a pair of six-week classes, one on the study of games and one on the study of play, and includes some worksheets that can be given as class assignments (printed in such a tiny font that I had to squint to read it, but thankfully including a link to a soft copy online).

I didn't see any blatant errors; the content is pretty solid for what it is. In fact, my lesson plans for my Game Industry Survey course already contain a lot of this information, so I may not be as hopeless at game studies as I used to think I was. And the book is a fast read, so if you know nothing about video games and need to get up to speed pronto, this is a pretty decent bet. It starts off with a bit of academic jargon in the first few pages, but quickly lapses into a more readable, conversational tone.

That said, the book has what I see as a major conceptual flaw, and it's something that has probably been bugging some of you since a couple of paragraphs ago: this is written to assist those who are teaching a game studies class, but don't know the first thing about it. So I have to ask... for those who don't know anything about a subject, why are they teaching it in the first place? This book doesn't qualify someone to teach a class in game studies, any more than reading the Cliffs Notes version of Hamlet would qualify me to teach a class on Shakespeare in the English department. A teacher who knows nothing about a subject should not teach a course in that subject. Period. Am I the only one who thinks this? Am I oversimplifying? At any rate, it seems to me that if someone needs this book, then really they don't need the book, they need to not teach the class. So I'm suddenly not seeing the point of this book existing in the first place.

For those who teach game studies and are fully qualified, most of the content in this book is a waste of time, because you know it already. You won't see anything new. About the only thing that might be of use is the worksheets and lesson plans, which amount to maybe a tenth of the total book, and you can probably find more and better content in the IGDA Edu Curriculum Knowledge Base. The best reason to buy this book, then, appears to be the picture of Lara Croft wearing glasses and looking all educated on the front cover.

Students: Ironically, I think the people who would get the most use out of this book are students who are contemplating a Game Studies or Media Studies major. The book is short, it's easy to read, you can skip over the academic parts, and it'll give you a head start for your Game Studies 101 class (and give you some idea of the kinds of things you'll be studying). Just be aware that neither this book nor any related course of study will actually help you to make games, it will only let you study them.

Instructors: As mentioned above, either you don't need this book (in which case, buying it is a problem), or you do need this book (which is itself a problem). I did think of one edge case where the book might be useful: if you're teaching a more general Media Studies class (comparing and contrasting various media and how to study them) and you want to include a week or two on games but you're unfamiliar with this medium, then this book would be suitable for you to build that content into an existing class.

Professionals: If you're a practicing professional who knows all about making games but you never actually got to take any game studies courses in college (because you were too busy learning game development), and you'd like to read the books out there like Rules of Play except they're too big and intimidating to fit into your busy schedule, this will give you the quick-and-dirty introduction you're looking for.

Culture Shock: Deans and Heads and Chairs, Oh My!

2008-08-21T10:26:00.004-04:00

When I was a student, my only real faculty contact came from my professors. Sure, there were all these other people out there with titles like "dean" and "department chair" and "provost" but I never had any dealings with them, nor did I have any idea what they did. I had no concept of departmental politics or inter-departmental territorial disputes; I couldn't see beyond the exam next week.

Now, as a faculty, I see all this stuff (even though I sometimes wish I didn't... sort of like if you enjoy eating sausage and then see how it gets made). But it occurs to me that it's still off the radar of most students (and, indeed, most industry professionals who have some dealings with educators).

I'm not sure what, if anything, to do about it. Part of me feels like students should probably at least know who the dean of their department is and why that matters. Maybe the non-teaching faculty should do more to have contact with students in informal settings (not that they would necessarily have the time, with their overloaded schedules)? Or maybe the teachers who have a lot of student contact should speak a little bit about departmental issues in their classes so that the whole thing is a little more transparent?

Difficult Assignments

2008-08-21T10:21:00.002-04:00

As a student, whenever I received an obviously challenging assignment, my first assumption was that the professor was a sadist who just enjoyed seeing students fail. (Apparently I'm not the only one; typing "sadistic professor" into Google gives 755,000 hits.)

Being on the other side, I do give challenging assignments in my classes, and even difficult questions on quizzes and exams. But I do it for the opposite reason: it doesn't give me any joy to see a student fail (quite the contrary), but it does give me great pleasure to see a student encounter a really tough problem... and then they succeed.

Culture Shock: Student Passion (or lack thereof)

2008-08-17T09:48:00.000-04:00

I've recently mentioned the lack of passion I've seen in teachers, compared to that of game developers. It occurs to me that the same complaint can be made of students.

Admittedly, this is largely the teachers' fault. How hard is it to get excited about something when you're learning from someone in the field who just isn't excited about their own work? Still, it's a bit of a surprise for me, coming from a job where everyone is working together as a team to make games... and seeing students working in a totally different way.

In the game industry, at least on the projects I've worked on, most people care about the project. Sure, if you work really hard to finish the work on your plate, your "reward" is to get even more work piled on you. So if you're cynical, you could say that the best "strategy" is to just do the bare minimum you need to not get fired. After all, you're salaried, so it's not like working harder actually means more money or rewards or anything. And yet... that almost never happens in practice, because the real reward is that your game is better. And if you care about the game, and you want it to be a good game, then you'll do whatever you can to make it the best game you possibly can. If you don't care about the game... well, there's a whole big software development industry out there that has nothing to do with games, which will pay you more money for less work. So people don't tend to become game developers unless they have this drive to make great games.

You'd think that the same would be true of game dev students, wouldn't you? Put a group of students together to make a game, and you'd expect them to all work insane hours and do everything they can to make it the best student project ever. After all, it's not like students can't do amazing work.

But in practice, you don't always see this. Sometimes you get an outstanding student team (usually the result of a single outstanding student leader who pulls the team together, and if you removed that one student the whole thing would collapse). But I'm seeing a lot of cases where this isn't happening at all. Some students don't show up for meetings and don't do any work at all -- as if they wanted a free ride, just a grade, and they don't care that this project is something that could go in their portfolio and get them a job (among other things). Students make excuses about why their work is late, when I know full well it's because they were just goofing off and procrastinating, a sign that they don't really care much about their project (they just see it as classwork, not an original project).

I'm still trying to find ways to make sure students get it, that game projects are an opportunity to create something experimental and new and different and original and really really cool (possibly the last opportunity they'll have for the next ten years of their career), and that they should really care about it. But I feel like it's an uphill battle sometimes, like I'm fighting against a dozen years of "education" that teaches students to jump through hoops for a piece of paper with the attitude that the real stuff comes later after graduation.

And it's a bit of a shock for me, even now, because I don't have to deal with this in the industry. I don't have to ask the programmers on a big-budget game to show up to work and give their best effort, because they already do.

Random Teaching Bits

2008-08-14T22:02:00.000-04:00

I recently attended a teaching workshop. (Irony: during the day, as I was learning to become a better teacher, I totally blew off the online class I'm teaching.)

Here are some takeaways I got from the session:

Normally at the beginning of a course, I ask students what their expectations are. This is good; it gives them ownership over the contents, and ensures that everyone's taking the right course for them. However, there's a problem: most of the time, my students don't know to expect, so they say nothing. Possible solution: ask where they see themselves ten years from now if they continue in this field. What skills do they expect they'll need and use? This lets me deal with student expectations about the course and the industry at the same time, and a greater number of them will have something to say in response since they all probably have some image in their head (no matter how inaccurate) about What It's Like Out There.
Another problem I run into occasionally is a student who is having issues outside of class and it makes their coursework suffer, but I don't hear about it until after the fact. Solution: address this on the first day of class as a matter of policy. I particularly liked how one professor put it: "my job (as a teacher) is to help my students succeed, and I can't do that if I'm not kept in the loop."
Lastly, part of the process of mastery and learning is feeling really stupid at times, and this is something that I don't think occurs to a lot of students (especially if they've excelled at all of their classes before). Really, the more you know in a field, the more you realize that you don't know. Once you master the basics, that's when it starts occurring to you that there are all these unsolved problems, and all these new ways to put things together. As a result, the smarter you get, the more ignorant you feel. Corollary: if you feel like a total moron, it probably means you're learning something!

The Importance of Keeping in Touch

2008-08-11T09:46:00.000-04:00

I recently had a conversation with Alex, a former student of mine who made it in the industry (and totally deserves it, and I mean that in a good way). He's just finishing up his first project, so I took the time to get in touch with him and -- without having him break any NDAs -- did something of a post-mortem on his college education.

It occurred to me afterwards how useful our conversation was. As a teacher, I get some feedback during the education process but I get precious little after the students leave campus, so how am I to evaluate if my teaching is useful? An hour on the phone was worth a hundred end-of-course evaluations.

The biggest takeaways I wanted from the conversation:

Did he enjoy the job? What were the best and worst parts? (This gives me additional content for my classes, either with a real-life horror story or success story, and some people might actually know him so the stories are more credible.)
What was it like working on the project? (This tells me how obsolete I am. For now, at least, his experiences were similar to mine... so my descriptions of what it's like out there as a newbie are still valid for now. Whew!)
What were some challenges they ran into in the project? (This is also an obsolescence gauge, and it tells me if I'm teaching the right skills based on whether I have course assignments that mimic real-world challenges.)
What were some things that he encountered in the industry that I just totally failed to prepare him for? (The scariest question to ask but the most important.)

Anyway, I would encourage other professors and recently-graduated students to do something like this, especially at the time when the ex-students are just finishing their first project and have some time to reflect. Professors: initiate the conversation, as some students may be too busy or intimidated to just open up and start criticizing you after they're gone. Students: initiate the conversation, as professors tend to keep busy and have lots of things going on at once, and it'll be much easier for them to have this feedback if you open the door.

For what it's worth, my two big takeaways from this for myself:

What went right: the importance of learning a new genre. Alex had never even heard of the genre they were creating before (tower defense games) and he had to learn really fast! This is a common thing in the industry for new designers, and being able to research a type of game they've never played before is a great skill to have. I had my students create a user interface for a modern football game, given the (correct) assumption that most of them weren't that familiar with sports games... or sports, for that matter. There's even an entire chapter in my book on how to work with an unfamiliar genre (Chapter 12).
What went wrong: I didn't place enough emphasis on Excel in my classes. Sure, I said plenty of times that Excel is to game designers what Microsoft Visual Studio is to programmers and that students should do everything from keeping game stats to their checkbook and grocery list in Excel just to get familiarity with it... but how often did I actually give a game design assignment that required the use of Excel? Almost never. And I never gave any lectures on advanced features of Excel that are useful for game designers (like the use of RAND, RANK and VLOOKUP to create a randomly-shuffled deck of cards). I could probably offer an entire course in "Excel for Game Designers" but failing that I should at least have a few homework assignments that require it.

Updated Labels

2008-08-09T01:29:00.003-04:00

As long as I'm on a blog-housekeeping kick, I've just bitten the bullet and added labels to all old posts, so if there's a particular post of interest you should hopefully be able to find similar posts this way. Enjoy!

I have a feed

2008-08-07T22:52:00.000-04:00

Several people have asked me in the past if I have some kind of newsfeed for this blog. I had no idea. It's kind of like when someone asks you for your phone number, and you can't remember because you never call yourself.

Brenda kindly pointed out to me that I do indeed have one, and it's here: http://teachingdesign.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

So, for anyone wondering how to subscribe, there you are.

Bloom's Taxonomy

2008-08-04T09:17:00.000-04:00

In the past, I've said that there's a direct link between education and game design. Mostly, I think about things that teachers can learn from the field of game design (because in my experience, a lot of teachers have trouble with something that games do really well: actively engaging the players/students). But this is my bias, because I have a lot more experience designing games than I do teaching. I'm just now realizing that game designers should be paying more attention to the field of education as well.

Case in point: Bloom's Taxonomy. Most game designers have never heard of this. I've heard it referenced often when teachers are talking to other teachers about their field, so presumably it is to education what the MDA Framework is to game design.

What is Bloom's Taxonomy? Long story short, it's a model for how we learn. First, we memorize a bunch of facts without really understanding them; then we start to understand what these things all mean, and we begin to actually use them to solve known problems; eventually, we learn to analyze new problems and solve them too, and if we stick around in a field long enough we learn to put existing tools, models and techniques together in new ways so that we can solve some problems that couldn't be solved before; finally, we get to the point where we can not only solve our own problems, but also evaluate other people's work in a competent way (which is something that, ideally, all teachers are capable of... but I digress).

Bloom's Taxonomy is important in teaching because it helps you to think of appropriate ways to design your courses based on learning goals. If you want your students to emerge from your course with the ability to analyze problems in your field, you're not gonna get there if all of your assignments and tests simply require rote memorization. On the flip side, if your goal is for your students to be able to apply knowledge to solve specific types of problems, then asking them to make abstract value judgments on other people's work is probably too advanced for the level you're teaching.

But enough about teaching -- think about this in terms of game design. Bloom's Taxonomy describes any kind of mastery... such as the act of a player mastering a game:

Knowledge = learning the basic controls and mechanics of the game
Comprehension = learning to use the controls without looking at the manual every 5 seconds; understanding the challenges that the game is throwing at you, and the general nature of what you must do to overcome them (whether you're capable of doing so or not)
Application = advancing in the game, using your skills to "beat" an enemy, boss, level, etc.
Analysis = optimizing your gameplay, e.g. choosing the best combination of skills, items and equipment for your party in an RPG. In other words, powergaming.
Synthesis = finding new methods to optimize your gameplay with. The player innovation in MMORPGs of calculating "damage per second" as the ultimate measure of strength is an example of this. Anyone can use damage-per-second, but to come up with the idea in the first place required a pretty deep understanding of the game.
Evaluation = at this point, I think we see a solid division between your average gamer and someone who has crossed the line to being either a game reviewer, critic, or designer. This would be the ability to look at several similar games and decide which one is "better" in some way (more fun, more balanced), while being able to back it up with solid reasons.

As a game designer, this has clear applications. Most games do not make use of all of these steps; a simple retro-arcade twitch game never goes beyond application, while only the most open-ended experiences lend themselves to any synthesis tasks. And this is fine, but it helps to explain why, say, a retro-arcade twitch game with an inventory/equipment system, multiple character classes, multi-level tech trees and such would probably not work.

This also explains what you need to do if you want to create an open-ended game where you expect players to find their own unique solutions to your puzzles (as in Thief or Portal). You have to work up to it, first taking your players through the knowledge, comprehension and application steps and making sure they're comfortable with those (perhaps by forcing them to: making it so that they cannot progress until they have mastered the basics). Only then can your players impress themselves with their own ingenuity at putting two mechanics together in creative and unexpected ways. Just giving the players all the tools up front and letting them play won't work, any more than giving your players a stack of equations on the first day of Physics 101 and then expecting them to "put it all together" and build a working rocket.

New Blog on Game Design Textbooks

2008-07-30T22:21:00.001-04:00

Game educator Malcolm Ryan has recently started a blog about books that are useful for game designers. He is planning to review one book per week until his bookshelf runs empty. So, it's no longer just me doing this, which is great because the more critics we have, the better (given how many horrible books there are out there).

So, let's all give Malcolm a warm welcome.

Challenges for Game Designers

2008-07-26T11:15:00.000-04:00

So, the book I've been writing with Brenda is almost done. We're going in to print this week, which means it should be available soon thereafter.

Description:

Game designers, like other artists, get better with practice. "Challenges for Game Designers" is a series of creative exercises based on real-world problems, allowing the aspiring and practicing game designer to hone their craft without taking the time and risk inherent in a full game development project. Well-known game designers contribute their own unique solutions, allowing a window into their thought processes. While most books in this field admit that a game designer must regularly design games, no other book gives the reader, whether student or professional, a starting place to practice their essential skills. "Challenges for Game Designers" is nothing but practice, making it an essential book on any designer's shelf.

The book came about when Brenda and I witnessed some other game educators asking if there was any way to teach game design that didn't require getting involved with computers and programming. Yes, of course you can, but there weren't any books that would really give a list of exercises that you could use for practice. So, we made one. The entire manuscript took about 6 months, so we probably set a new land speed record.

If you're interested, you can order it here, among other places. If you're an educator, contact the publisher for a free desk copy. If you're still making up your mind, the book also has a companion blog that you can view for free here.

Design Challenge on GameCareerGuide.com

2008-07-25T23:10:00.003-04:00

Apparently someone at GameCareerGuide was paying attention to this blog, because Jill Duffy took my game design assignment as inspiration for a full-fledged design challenge: create a player aid for RISK.

So, if you're interested in trying it out for yourself, head over there and read it, and then submit your work on their forum.

Another class assignment

2008-07-21T12:29:00.001-04:00

A teacher presented this as an assignment in a college Economics class. I think it would work well in a game design class as well, but this makes an interesting point: "design a game around the subject material" is actually a great assignment in any school subject.

This particular assignment had two parts:

Form groups. In your group, design a game, or mod an existing game (in this case, a game that uses economics to drive its core mechanics, but replace whatever suits you).
Then, give your game to another group, and receive a game from a third group. Playtest the game you're given, find the holes, and provide meaningful feedback.

This assignment gives practice in designing games, and also critically analyzing them, and also receiving constructive feedback on your own designs.

A Game Design Assignment

2008-07-18T14:52:00.001-04:00

Another teacher of game design mentioned this at Origins:

Take a relatively complex board game (say, Puerto Rico). Design a player aid for the game.

This forces students to exercise the following skills:

Reading and understanding the rules! This is actually a difficult task, and going through the process involves understanding that games are composed of rules, and learning how the different rules can work together. Students who play through the game instead of merely reading a rule sheet will learn that the dynamics of a game set in motion are sometimes very different -- and sometimes easier to understand -- than the static nature of a written document.
Learning how to explain the rules to someone else. This doesn't just mean writing a manual, it means making the game easy enough to learn that you don't need a manual. (Consider all of the video games today that do such a good job of teaching the player in the first few levels, that the written manual is superfluous.)
Evaluating the User Interface. Players must decide what parts of the game are the most confusing or intimidating. What is hard to use? What aspects of the game are unclear? This also requires the ability to conceptually divide the game into its component parts, and see the relationship between the mechanics and the UI.
Improving the UI. Once a problem is identified, the student must come up with a superior solution. In this case, it involves adding a new component: a player aid or quickref sheet of some kind, meant to simplify some confusing aspect(s) of the game. Oh, and of course you have to design the player aid so that it is itself easy to use, and doesn't make things more confusing.

And for all this thinking, the actual work output is simple: a small piece of cardboard or a single sheet of paper, perhaps. And that's the beauty of it: students learn that sometimes, a huge amount of work goes into a very small component of the game, but that component ends up making a huge difference in the player experience.

As an alternate, more advanced assignment, find a game with long, difficult or confusing rules and have students rewrite the rules to be more clear and concise.

Gender Pronouns in Writing

2008-07-15T22:45:00.001-04:00

Game designers do a lot of writing. So do teachers. And students, for that matter. So, I thought this writing tip that I picked up at Origins would be useful to most of you. (If only I had known this before finishing the writing on my textbook. Well, there's always 2nd Edition...)

Gender pronouns are always tricky. Use a gender-neutral he/his/him all the time and you've unwittingly added male gender bias (this is particularly insidious in game design documents, if you inherently assume the player is always male -- which perhaps explains why there are so many female characters in games wearing chainmail bikinis). Use she/hers/her and it looks like you're using feminine pronouns just for the heck of it. The dual him or her / he or she is unwieldy. The slash-based s/he looks ugly. The fusion hir looks downright alien. What's a writer to do?

Here's a simple solution: make it contextual. Use male pronouns for certain kinds of things, and female pronouns for others, and use them consistently.

The example given at Origins was in the writing of a rulebook for a tabletop RPG. The designer used female pronouns for the GM and male pronouns for the players. This not only caused the writing to be more gender-balanced, but also made the manual easier to read because it was clear who each pronoun was referring to!

Giving Great Game Demos

2008-07-10T15:24:00.003-04:00

Alex Yeager of Mayfair gave a great seminar at Origins called The 2-2-2 Demo. What follows are my notes. There are several applications:

If you regularly introduce your students or colleagues to new games, it helps if you can explain the rules succinctly. This is the direct application.
Explaining the rules of a game is no different than teaching any other course material. If you can explain how to play a game, you could use the same basic framework to explain your course material.
The process of creating a game demo has similarities to the process of designing an actual game.
You'll probably see other parallels as you read on.

What is a "game demo"?

In this particular context, it means a way of introducing someone else to a game they haven't played before. There are many reasons you might want to do this: to simply familiarize them with the game for educational or historical purposes, to get them interested in the game enough to play it, to convince them to buy it, etc.

There are many types of demos, but Alex gave three types: Two-sentence, Two-minute and To-play (hence, "2-2-2").

The Two-Sentence demo

In the game industry, we would call this an "elevator pitch." In just a couple sentences, state the basic theme and goal of the game. The purpose here is not to explain the rules, but to gauge and generate interest. It gives the other person an opportunity to bow out without you wasting ten minutes on a full rules explanation before saying they're not interested. If they are interested, this provides a context for everything that follows.

The Two-Minute demo

Discuss the type/genre of game, general flow of gameplay, win conditions and other important core mechanics. Take the two-sentence demo and add detail. Emphasize the important decisions that players are making.

Again, the purpose here isn't to give the other person everything they need to play, but it makes a full explanation of the rules go much faster if they already have a mental framework to put things in context. The purpose is still to generate enough interest to proceed to a full demo.

The two-minute demo has another purpose. People who have played the game, like it and want to evangelize it can use a version of your two-minute demo when they show the game to their peers. This provides a way for you to "deputize" players so that they can generate interest in the game from their friends, who can all them come back to you. (Think about this. Do you teach any courses where your students are actively recruiting on your behalf for next semester?)

It's worth mentioning that some games do this for you automatically. If a game has neat-looking components that make players go "wow... what's that? Can we play that one?" then you can safely skip the short version and leap into the rules. Not many games have that kind of "curb appeal" but a few do.

The To-Play demo

When game enthusiasts want to demo a game, many of them leap immediately into a full explanation of the rules. For some people (e.g. other hardcore gamers who have already agreed to play) this is fine. Other people (especially non-gamers) may still be tentatively deciding whether they want to play at all, and launching into a full-blown rules description can quickly overwhelm them.

Use this demo to teach the game to people who have already decided to play. They are actively engaged and they've got the time and opportunity. Otherwise, start with something simpler.

The best to-play demos are things you've practiced before. Become intimately familiar with the rules yourself before teaching them, ideally. Think of ways to present the rules so that they're easy to understand, flow well and can be explained in a minimum amount of time.

Personally, I've found that for most board games, the following framework tends to work well:

First, state the object of the game, unless it's really obscure or needs other information to be understood. It provides the context for why the player should care about other rules. Frame all other rules in terms of "how can you use this to win?"
Then, talk about the progression of play. How do turns work? What can you do on your turn? Start with the things you do most of the time, and just briefly touch on exceptions that only come up once in awhile.
Next, mention the game end condition. What causes the game to end, and how (if at all) do players have control over causing the game to end or continue?
If you can just set up the game yourself without having to explain initial setup as a series of rules, do so. Otherwise, explain the first part of the game last, after the players already understand the general flow of play and can make intelligent decisions during setup.

Implications for playing games

When explaining games to people who aren't gamers (like friends or family), start with very simple explanations. Don't continue into something more complex until you see the other person's interest, or else you may bore or overwhelm them.

Implications for teaching

Start each course topic with a general "why should I care?" / "why is this cool?" overview, then layer on some basic details and the overall flow of what you're about to learn, and then go into the gory details once you've got the class interested. Once your students see why the stuff you're teaching is important, they'll pay a lot more attention.

Implications for game design

Don't create a game (either digital or non-digital) where your players must understand and master all of the mechanics before they make their first move. Try to create play situations where the player is slowly and gently introduced to new mechanics, allowed to feel through the general flow of the game in a relatively safe environment. Then, add the details once the player is hooked.

Bonus insight: Implications for curriculum design

According to Alex, there's a pattern when introducing Eurogames to kids who are unfamiliar with them:

When you teach one game, that's all they want to play. "I played Settlers of Catan before, it was fun, I want to play it again." There are, apparently, no other games worth playing.
When you teach a second game, there's a choice: play X or play Y. "We played Carcassonne last time, let's try Settlers again."
But when you teach a third game, something magical happens. The players start seeing connections and comparisons that go beyond simple either/or choices. "Let's see... I'm in the mood for a trading/auction game, and Joe says he has to be somewhere in an hour so it can't be more than that, and Sarah hasn't played before and wants something easy to learn... how about Modern Art?"

I think education may work like this in general. Take a Biology 101 class where they force you to memorize all of the structures of the cell, and you assume that the entire field is just memorization. Take Genetics and you might think that the field is part memorization, part math. Take a microbiology course... and suddenly you realize that it's actually a really diverse field, and all those other courses aren't just repeats of the same stuff you've taken already, they're starting with some basic concepts and taking them in a whole new direction, and how cool is that? But only the people in the major get to see this. Implication: the "101" or "Survey" courses, especially those aimed at non-majors or prospective majors, should be designed to expose them to at least three different areas of the field. In these classes, focus less on laying a foundation for the major, and more on the diversity and overarching patterns and common problems that they will see in the field.

Back on regular posting schedule

2008-07-09T14:44:00.003-04:00

First there was Origins. Then I came back to find that I had a week to finish up final review for my first book. Then I got some short-term industry contract work. So, things have kept me busy, but I'm now back. In the coming weeks I'll follow up with what I learned at Origins this year in terms of teaching, game design and more.

One thing I've been thinking about for a little while now is the similarity between education and game design. I'm starting to actually read some books on education, and an awful lot of concepts are identical, they just have different names. I heard this from several teachers at Origins as well -- after seeing my presentation, they remarked that some general concepts of game design are the same as in the professional literature for education, except that they are perhaps easier to understand in the context of games (if the teacher happens to be a gamer, at any rate).

For example, one of the concepts most game designers are familiar with is the MDA Framework, which says (among other things) that there are many different kinds of fun, that different games offer different combinations of these kinds of fun, and that different players find some kinds of fun more or less engaging than others. There's a parallel to different kinds of learners in a classroom environment: audio learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners and so on, where each student is engaged by a particular type of activity. It's not much of a stretch to find links between the kinds of classroom activities and the kinds of fun in game that people find engaging.

A more interesting example is rubrics. I'd never heard the term 'rubric' before becoming a teacher. Essentially it means making a list of skills, and then grouping and classifying them. For example, a grading rubric for a class would list all of the things students are expected to be able to do after taking the class, and then what skills the students must build in order to do those things, and then what the students must demonstrate (and at what level) in order to achieve an A, B, C, etc.

Most teachers I know hate developing rubrics. It's a chore that involves tons of paperwork, and defining all these tiny details about a class and the concepts that you're teaching and how they all relate to each other and how you plan to measure everything. It's something that teachers do only when forced at gunpoint.

And yet, there are designers of computer/console role-playing games that do essentially the same thing. What are the capabilities that I want the players to be able to take advantage of in and out of combat? What are the skills, abilities and magic spells that I can make available to the players to allow them to accomplish these feats? How should I group these skills and abilities and spells -- by function, by elemental sphere, by character class? How do players gain access to these skills -- leveling up, completing quests, finding items? And this is the kind of content design that RPG designers absolutely love. It's the really fun part. It's a hoot. They'll go back and design more of these skills for fun, on their own time, rather than doing the important work like testing the combat system for balance.

Somehow, there has got to be a way to make rubrics as exciting as RPG design. I haven't figured out how yet. But it's the same freaking task.

Origins 2008

2008-06-25T07:25:00.002-04:00

It's that time of year again.

I'll be speaking twice:

Friday 6/27 @ 9am, room C215: "Game Design for Teachers" - basically a repeat of last year's presentation (I posted a two-part summary here and here). Last year I ran out of time, so I streamlined the content a bit for this year, concentrating on the theory more than the practical.
Saturday 6/28 @ 9am, room C215: "Advanced Game Design for Teachers" - new this year, includes the practical aspects (some case studies that I wouldn't have time to present in the other session) and a short workshop where we'll take some content from the attendees and find ways to present it to the class in a more game-like way.

I'll also be taking a lot of photos and meeting with some game publishers for the book, so I expect this year to be a bit different in that I'll be spending as much time doing work as I will be playing games.

This year will also be different in that I know some of my students will actually be there. (It helps when my students from this last year live in the same city, as opposed to 80 miles away.)

If anyone out there is in the area, feel free to find me and say hi. And if anyone out there happens to be a teacher in the area (this includes anything from homeschooling to K-12 to grad student TA to college professor), bring your credentials and you get in the door for free.

Why You Hated Your College Teachers

2008-06-22T13:28:00.003-04:00

Okay, there were probably a handful of professors that were incredibly inspirational to you, but these stood out in a sea of instructors that you've long since forgotten. (Even if you're currently a student.)

Having compared three different schools that I've worked at, I think I know why.

A full-time teaching instructor is expected to teach four classes at a time. From my experience, teaching a class takes about ten hours a week (this includes about 4 hours in class, plus extra time for prep work and grading). So far, that's a 40-hour work week, which is expected.

But then you have office hours, typically anywhere from 4 to 10 additional hours per week. If your students don't show up then you can use this time for grading, but it seems to me that if you're counting on your students never visiting you then that's a greater problem... but it's certainly not something you should be encouraging as a teacher.

Then there's academic advising, which is nothing most of the time but makes for a week of hell somewhere near the end of each class, as you get a flood of students with paperwork. So far I haven't been involved in this process enough to say what the time commitment is, but I think I can reasonably say that it's not zero.

There are department meetings, which is an extra hour or two every week or two. Already we're somewhere around 50 hours per week. If you want to do anything extracurricular, such as be the sponsor of a student club or perform community outreach to local high schools or offer seminars to your faculty colleagues or what have you, that's extra. Some schools mandate that you put in a minimum number of these kinds of extra hours, others don't.

Now, those of you in the game industry are scoffing at me here. I'm concerned about a mere 50 hours, when it's not unheard of in game development to pull 90+ for extended periods? Ah, but here's the rub: game developers are, by and large, a passionate bunch. We got into the game industry specifically because we love games and want to make them. I'd say that of the professional developers I've worked with, somewhere around 90% of them have a passion for their work and are more than willing to put some extra time in if it'll improve their project, or if it'll give them a chance to improve their own skills and hone their craft.

Teaching is different. Of all the professors I've met, maybe 5% are passionate about teaching, so very few are going to willingly put in the extra time unless forced at gunpoint. And the thing is, with both teaching and game dev, the quality of the final product is proportional to the amount of work you put in.

There are other things that modify a teacher's workload:

Studio/practical classes take significantly less time than lectures. You just have to design assignments, so the amount of prep work before class is minimal. Strangely, it counts as the same, so loading up on studio classes is a way to game the system. Of course, someone has to teach the lecture-based classes, so you're just reducing your workload at the expense of your colleagues (who are probably not as passionate about teaching as you).
Online classes are insidious. They seem like they should take less time because there is no lecture, but I think they actually take slightly more time because you have to log in, check email and contribute to discussions on an almost-daily basis. Think about how much time you spend just checking your email, RSS feeds and discussion forums in the morning and you'll see what I mean. The time flies by so it doesn't feel that bad, but the total time per week is a little more than a typical lecture class, so you have to be careful. Some schools recognize this and actually pay a slight premium to online instructors; others treat online as equivalent to a "normal" class.
For lecture classes, my above figure of 10 hours per week depends on two major factors: amount/intensity of grading, and amount of previous course prep. If your assignments are easier to grade (e.g. multiple-choice as opposed to essay questions) that will reduce your time commitment, at the expense of having assignments that are meaningful -- the Real World rarely gives you multiple choices, after all. As for course prep, a class requires more time the first time you teach it. Some schools give you a break if one of your courses is brand-new and developed by you (say, only teaching 3 classes instead of 4), while others make no such allowances.

There's a common theme here. Almost everything that a teacher can do to make their own life easier, does so only at the cost to the quality of their students' education. Which means that the teachers who are passionate about teaching and really care are the ones who spend 60+ hours per week, and everyone else is going to do whatever they can to bring their hours worked as close to 40 as possible.

From Gamer to Designer

2008-06-14T10:20:00.003-04:00

Most of the people I knew in the game industry who were game designers, were that way from a very young age (myself included). We would make games, even if they weren't very good. When we played games, we would think about the rules. We would write design documents in crayon. It's just something we did naturally, without having to be prompted.

I'm sure that in the game industry, that made game designers easy to screen out. If you ask a question like "what's your favorite game" and then start analyzing that game -- what were the design mistakes (no game is perfect, even your favorite), what would you have done differently, what elements of the game make it so compelling -- the discussion flows naturally with the right candidate. For the people who are more gamer than game designer, though, this kind of question is anathema. "What do you mean, critique my favorite game of all time? It's awesome, it's great, what more is there to say?"

Because that's clearly helpful in a design document, saying that the game should be "great" and "awesome."

Now, I'm in the position of teaching people to be game designers, and it's just occurred to me that my classes have a high proportion of gamers in them, and not everyone sees the distinction. I didn't notice the dividing line in my classes either, until just now when grading the final exam. One of the questions goes something like this: "Write a one-paragraph game concept for a video game that has the following constraints: blah blah blah." And the answers that I get fall into a few different categories:

"My game will be just like a combination of this game and this other game." Great, but what if I haven't played those games? And how do you plan on being innovative if all of your ideas are based on earlier video games?
"My game has this story..." Okay, maybe you have a future as a story writer, but my class is in game design, specifically core mechanics. What does the player do?
A full paragraph with all sorts of things describing how great and fun it will be, with maybe two words to give some clue as to the actual gameplay. These are the fanboys (or fangirls, I suppose, but in my experience it's always the guys that do this). It makes me sad to see that after ten full weeks of learning about how to speak critically about games, as soon as I ask someone to apply it then it all goes out the window and they revert to their earlier fanboy status. I suppose there are some kinds of people that I haven't figured out how to reach yet.
And every now and then, I see a student who writes a concept that includes a description of mechanics and gameplay. Apparently, it doesn't occur to them that the question would be asking for anything else (and they're right).

Generally, the students who answer in the latter category are the ones who tend to do well in the class overall. It's making me wonder if this is something of a litmus test for game designers: ask an open-ended question that involves designing a simple game concept, and see what people do. Maybe I'll try that on the first day of class next time, as opposed to on the final exam...

And then for the students who aren't getting it on Day One, I need to work out some strategy to get them to abandon their lifelong gamer mentality for long enough to start thinking like a designer.