Game Designer as Event Host

It occurs to me that if game design is about creating an enjoyable player experience, it must share something in common with other fields that have similar goals: hotel guest services, cruise ship directing, wedding/party planning, and special event hosting. The abstract idea of "customer-centric" thinking and design applies to all of these.

Yesterday, we were fortunate enough to have a special event on campus that was one of the most terribly-run things I've had the misfortune to attend. It was a great case study for my design students; I hope they come back in future years to provide such a powerful object lesson for future classes.

The event was run by some promotions company that was apparently hired by Microsoft to push the Xbox 360, but in the process picked up game-friendly sponsors like Best Buy and (for some reason) Suzuki. They were certainly well-funded; they came with a pimped-out car and a large bus with sponsor decals all over, and they brought forty 360's (I suppose that makes one Xbox 14400, har) and so many plasma screens, and all kinds of giveaway swag. The guys running the event had an average of about ten years experience each. So, they had all the tools and potential for a massively successful event on any college campus. Which makes the whole thing that much more disappointing (and informative).

Among their errors:

• No advance promotion of the event. They had people scattered across campus handing out fliers the morning of. No one I talked to knew anything about it beforehand, in spite of there being rather prominent television, radio and newspaper media all over the place.
• Very loud music was playing at the event, making it impossible to hear any sound from the games themselves. This made the new Dance Dance Revolution game impossible to play.
• All those consoles and not enough controllers. Dance Dance Revolution (a game meant to be played socially) had one dance mat per console, so you couldn't play with a friend (and it was one of those cheap $10 pads too, so you couldn't play any advanced songs). Fuzion Frenzy 2, a party game meant to be played with four people, had two controllers. Gears of War, a first-person shooter known for its excellent multiplayer mode (and equally known for its mediocre one-player) had one controller.
• Some guy was trying to be an emcee, walking around with a microphone and taunting the people who were trying to play. In the words of one of my students, "he was trying way too hard to look like he was cool."
• Overall, the whole thing just felt like it was put together by people who knew a lot about promotional events... and absolutely nothing about games or gamers. The result is similar to what happens when an all-male team of game developers tries to make a game for little girls.

What lessons do we learn about game design from this? Well, that's an exercise I left to my students!

Kurt Squire on Curricular Models

Another wonderful talk from the IGDA Educational SIG at GDC, courtesy of Kurt Squire. These are my notes:


A few years ago, we had: Game Dev programs (DigiPen, Full Sail); “Art and Design” schools (but with few game-specific offerings); ETC at CMU (grad school only); Computer Science; Media Arts & Sciences; Instructional Design; and for college dropouts, the School of Hard Knocks.

Today, we have game design degrees! Why? Popularity (or, increased enrollment); Intellectually interesting; Training for the game industry; Core disciplinary issues: interactivity, teamwork, etc. (carries over to many other fields).

There are lots of different ways to study games.

All faculty who teach games ought to play them, regularly.

Consider a “boot camp” introduction model: low-level courses that show that game development is very hard work, to turn away the students who aren’t self-motivated or serious about making games their career.

What happens outside class is more important than in class. Set up your academic program to encourage out-of-class work. One thing that can help a lot: have your university provide an open lab space where students can work on their own game projects – ad-hoc, informal, driven by excited students.

Have students work in teams. Have your faculty understand (and teach) cooperative learning.

You and your students will have many iterations for everything: individual projects, courses, and overall curriculum. Learn from failures.

Create opportunities for celebration, community ritual. Example: student project showcase at the end of each year.

Game Research Case Studies

There isn't a lot of academic research in the field of game design, and what little there is, I have trouble relating to. At the IGDA Educational SIG at GDC, it was refreshing to see a number of different takes on research that focus on gameplay -- exactly the type of research I'd like to do myself, in those hours when I'm not teaching. Here are my notes from the session:

Jesse Schell (CMU ETC):

• Industry/Academic bridges are mostly 1:1.
• One major problem: many universities can’t hire people with just a BS/BA degree, regardless of industry experience. (Example from last year’s GDC: the Lead Artist for World of Warcraft is unqualified to teach art at many universities. Wait… unqualified?)
• There’s a huge bonus on both sides if this problem can be solved. As people cross borders between Industry and Academy, there is a transfer of technology and information.
• The universities that build the best programs will likely be the ones that are able to find loopholes in the system, creative ways to get experienced industry people teaching their students in some capacity.

James Dargie (EALA):

• Internally, EA has a process that’s something like rapid prototyping, but with artists instead of technical designers.
• Pre-rendered trailer video, takes 1 to 3 months.
• Shows visual style, quality bar and gameplay features at the start of a project.

Jeremy Gordon (Secret Level / SEGA):

• Undirected R&D is attractive to industry since we’re all trying to solve the problems we don’t know about yet.
• But… it requires overtime or extra funding (or both), and there’s no immediate ROI.

Doug Whately (Breakaway Games):

• Breakaway has an interesting funding model internally: Serious Games and Entertainment Games divisions. Serious provides funding for Entertainment, which is treated as funded R&D whose results can be used by Serious.
• (I found out later that there’s a similar symbiotic relationship between Wahoo Studios and NinjaBee, with Wahoo creating AAA games that fund NinjaBee’s low-budget indie games, which in turn are treated as R&D to help Wahoo.)
• Working with universities is hard because of scheduling. Universities work around the academic calendar; game studios work around fiscal years.
• Suggested that some studios might do better if they have rotating undergrad internships throughout the year, encouraging Seniors to take a quarter or semester “sabbatical” to work in the industry for 3-4 months during the school year. In this way, a company can have a steady supply of student interns year-round… not just in the Summer.
• In classroom learning games, expect to see a huge battle between professors. Half will love it because it gives them new tools to teach; half will hate it because it’s an outside intrusion into their acutely-honed, time-tested lesson plans.

John Hopson (Microsoft Games User Research Group):

• Developers are inherently distrustful of anyone trying to tell them how to do their job. This includes academic researchers. If you approach a studio saying “my research shows exactly what you’re doing wrong”… prepare to be ignored.
• Start out with one-on-one: “Give me half an hour of your time, and we’ll show you how to make a better game.” After that works and you’ve built up a small amount of trust, ask for a little more… one baby step at a time. Build long-term trust.
• Schools need to promote their technology to the industry: make sure you show up on a Google search when the industry is looking for you!
• Build cool stuff. If you write a paper for the industry that you think is so great, why don’t you use it? Better to make a working demo, then write a paper that explains how you did it. (Façade is a good example of this.)
• We all have the same concerns as any other field of research that tries to interface with industry. The only difference is that our industry is relatively new.

Doug Church on Academic/Industry Collaboration

The great Doug Church gave a keynote at the IGDA Educational SIG at GDC. Here are my notes from his session:

Research:

• The things the industry wants done, it’s doing already.
• The things the industry doesn’t know it needs… well…
• There is no pattern of discovery in gameplay, i.e. no way to build on previous work. Game AI is in a similar state. (Graphics and Physics do have a pattern of discovery; that’s what SIGGRAPH is for.)
• There is no design publishing culture, and no design or game-analysis critical vocabulary. We’re stuck describing game mechanics as “it’s like this other game”.
• Not much “software publishing” culture at universities.
• Ideally, it would be good to enable undirected research in the Academy.

Sharing Tools/Engines:

• Academics are always asking to use industry game engines to help with their work.
• Industry doesn’t want to inflict their barely-working engine on poor unsuspecting academics. (Engines are usually coupled with the team and processes that built them; just handing an engine to someone else won’t be much help.)
• Also, some companies treat their engine as IP.
• Memorable quote: “If someone stole all the code from Electronic Arts, it would probably hurt them more than help them.”

Knowledge Transfer:

• The people in the industry didn’t learn from textbooks.
• The industry is guild/apprentice like. No shared context, philosophy or vocabulary.
• When an academic tries to approach someone in industry, the response has more to do with timing than anything else: a developer under crunch won’t respond to your emails even if they’d really like to help you.
• The industry has a hard time with long-term commitment. The Academy can’t easily promise specifics or results by a given date. This makes it hard for the industry to fund formal academic research.
• Also, developers are skeptical of formal training, while academics are skeptical of the academic value of games. (Hopefully both of these will change in the future.)

What Next?

• Students are the key stakeholders in everything; put them first.
• More industry/academics working together; for now this is limited to 1:1 collaborations.
• Universities must understand that a game-focused curriculum is not just an interesting backdrop for the “real” education, or a diversion from it; game development courses are an invitation into a community and a chance to choose a future.
• Use iterative processes on different ways to collaborate:
• Lightweight participation is easy. That’s what we do now. We need more 1:1 successes until we get some critical mass.
• Bidirectional placement! Can a developer teach a course in their spare time (or take a year off to do so full-time)? Can a professor work in industry during their sabbatical year?
• Developers need to give academics more access to their efforts, so that good practice can be studied and documented.
• More student group projects! (Amusing possibility: each year’s crop of students must not only create their own game project, but also support the previous team’s software.)
• We need formalized grammar and vocabulary, but it’s uncertain where this will come from. Previous tries from academia were forced/mandated and didn’t work. Not coming from industry, either.
• Overall: we need energy, motivation, mutual respect, and people who understand both sides… like today’s students!
• Both sides need to balance reality with idealism.

Q: How valuable is it to teach students methodologies (e.g. agile development, time estimation)?
A: Specifics are not as important as the experience of trying – and understanding that game development is hard and can go horribly wrong!

Q: How can academics study the industry when it’s so secretive?
A: Indie studios may be more willing to open their doors. Or, cultivate relationships with many individual developers, and contact someone who just shipped a successful game and has some pull in their organization.

The Critical Vocabulary Problem

I saw this touched on briefly at GDC this year, but no solutions were given. That's a shame, because it's not something that I can see solving itself anytime soon, and game designers really need to make some progress here.

The problem is that we really don't have a critical vocabulary in the field of game design. When we talk about game mechanics or dynamics, the best we can do is to compare it with what's been done before: "It's like the sandbox mode of GTA with the combat system from Halo, and the mini-map from Ratchet & Clank."

This is limiting: it prevents us from describing new innovations (I remember people trying to describe Everyday Shooter at GDC, and the best we could do was "you have to play it, then you'll understand"). It also limits us even when discussing purely derivative works; if I haven't played Okami, then you can't compare it to another game and have any real understanding between us.

So, we need a better vocabulary. Which leads to the next problem: everyone writing a game design textbook is trying to solve the problem at the same time, each with their own proposed language.

None of these get absorbed into the collective consciousness of the industry, because no single textbook on game design has been read by enough game designers. But designers in the field aren't trying to create their own vocabulary, either.

As a teacher, this creates additional problems. Suppose I use a textbook that uses a combination of existing industry jargon, and new terminology coined by the authors. I've yet to see a book that makes a distinction between the two, so I have to manually warn my students about which terms are okay to use if they're talking with a designer, and which ones they should ignore (or at least use cautiously). But then, if enough students who studied one particular textbook find themselves in the industry, this terminology could start getting used... and then I'm in the position of trying to predict which of the many textbooks will see widespread adoption in the next few years.

And then there are the teachers out there who have no game design (or game industry) experience, and couldn't tell a good textbook from a bad one, and won't be able to make the distinction between "currently in use" and "proposed" terminology in their classes. My students will be competing with these, and the other students may even sound smarter, with their talk about operational versus constructive rules... even though my students might be better prepared for the industry.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what direction a long-term solution can come from. Industry is too busy to figure this out on its own, and too insular to listen to suggestions from academics. Today's students may carry some critical vocabulary with them, but it's so scattered across many different texts that there's unlikely to be a consensus. I suppose it will ultimately take a single game design book that is so much better than the rest, that it gets adopted by every class overnight. Any volunteers to write it?

I now have a reputation for strange finals...

On Tuesday, I gave the game design final. Students in small teams learned to brainstorm game concepts over the course of the last ten weeks. This time I threw in a few twists. Three times, I changed the requirements. Once, I had one student from each group rotate to a new group (to simulate losing a team member and having to train a new one). Towards the end, I suddenly reduced the time limit, and then added it back when it would no longer do any good.

The students loved it. They totally understood that this was inspired by real-world events, and that all of the new requirements were drawn from previous projects they had done. I was afraid I'd hear a lot of complaints of unfairness, but my fears turned out to be unnecessary.

I did hear of a similar mechanism from another game design teacher at GDC. Instead of having pre-scripted events like mine, she used a "wheel of misfortune" to choose events randomly. I prefer that solution as a way to deflect students' ire (if there is any) -- it's not my fault, it's the wheel!

Conflicting Goals for Game Schools

As I recover from GDC, I'll be posting all of the stuff I learned about teaching and game design. I probably have enough material to keep me busy for the next few months.

I'll start off with an inherent conflict within any sort of game-related program: the desire to attract students, and the need to only graduate the best ones.

On the need to attract students:

• If you're at a liberal arts college that's experimenting with its first game curriculum, you need decent enrollment numbers to show student interest. If your numbers are too low, the program gets canceled.
• More students means more funding, which translates to better equipment and more resources to help your students make great games.
• If your school has a reputation for a 90% dropout rate because you're just that harsh to your students, you'll have a hard time attracting anyone -- even skilled students who can make it, but who might not have the self-confidence to try.
• Failed attempts hurt students a bit too much. If you have two semesters' worth of F's, it would take seven years' worth of straight A's to get back to a 3.5 GPA (which is a requirement for some grad schools and scholarships). Without some kind of grade amnesty/forgiveness, this seems a bit harsh for a program that will obviously interest many students who aren't prepared for it.

On the need to only graduate a few:

• The game industry is still very skeptical of game-related academic programs. Simply slapping a label like "Game Design Major" on your students will not give them any legitimacy when they look for jobs.
• Because of this, your students are effectively representing your school and in fact all schools with game programs whenever they interact with the industry in any way.
• Since it's such a small industry, word gets around very fast. If one company hires one of your students and later finds out they have no idea what they're doing, it will be an uphill battle for any of your future graduates since all of the major studios will "know" that your program isn't preparing its students.
• Even applying for a job is enough to soil your school's reputation. If a student shows a game-specific Major on a resume, attached to the worst cover letter ever written, what does that say about your school?
• The game industry is a harsh world. Treating students gently does not prepare them for cold reality. Better for students to get used to it in school, and those that can't handle the abuse will be happier in the long run to not enter the industry in the first place.

I can see both sides. So far, I've been erring on the side of helping students as best I can, because low enrollment numbers puts my department out of a job. In the future, as our program gets better established, I'd like to shift towards a "boot camp" mentality, with some low-level classes that are overly harsh. This allows students to self-select out of the sequence before they do too much damage to themselves, and guarantees that only the ones who are really serious will continue on to the more "fun" parts. But by then, we may already have a reputation for being too easy on our students, and it will take time to reverse that.

Welcome, new visitors

I've met a lot of new people at GDC already. The two-day workshop on education was an absolute blast, and I enjoyed meeting so many people struggling with the same challenges that I did. This is exactly the spirit in which GDC itself was originally founded -- we're all isolated from each other, forced to reinvent each other's wheels, so let's just get together and share our knowledge so that we can all benefit.

If you're new:

Most of my posts are not time-sensitive, so feel free to browse the archives (and even comment on them). A logical place to start would be my original welcome message, followed by my series of posts on building a game design curriculum.

For those of you looking for the notes from today's talks, the notes from the undergraduate game design session is here (thanks, Beth). The notes from my five-minute case study aren't online in the Education SIG blog right now, but my final exam rules are posted here, and my after-the-fact comments on the final exam are here.

Lies I Tell My Students

I'm not much of a party animal or night owl anyway, so I'll just finish grading all of the assignments at GDC after the day's sessions are over.

Yeah, right.

This would have worked last year when I was a newcomer. This year, I know far too many people in the community. I didn't realize this until last night, when I found enough people at the Marriott ("the new Fairmont") to keep me entertained until past midnight... and this is on Monday, before most people are even here.

Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Off to GDC

Well, this is it... I'm leaving in about half an hour for the airport.

For those of you who are going to GDC as well, I hope to see you there. Look for a guy in glasses with a gray hoodie and a backpack, with 1d3 students in tow at any given point in time, and the name "Ian Schreiber" dangling from his neck.

For those of you who aren't going, I'll try to keep this blog updated on the normal schedule... but no promises. Maybe I'll be so busy that I can't post anything. Maybe I'll see so much cool stuff that I'll post much more content than normal.

Teaching: Recent Advice

Recently, another (far more experienced than me) professor gave me some unsolicited advice about teaching. This is the first time that this has happened since I started teaching, and I am grateful for it:

• The best use of student evaluations (especially the numeric parts, i.e. "rate this professor from 1 to 10 in the following areas") is to identify my own relative strengths and weaknesses. There are no absolute criteria to base the numbers on, so knowing that I got a "7" in one category isn't that useful... unless most of my other numbers were significantly higher or lower.
• Sitting in on another professor's class in order to observe their teaching style is fine, but it's considered polite to warn them first and schedule in advance. No, I haven't committed a faux pas here... but I might have, since it never would have occurred to me. If someone sat in on my class unannounced I'd be flattered.
• College students aren't fully alert until around 10 or 11 am. If I get stuck with a 9:00 class, there is absolutely nothing I can do about this; it's a fight with human biology.
• (Corollary 1: If I ever have a say in such things, insist that the earliest classes of the day start at 10, even if it means that the afternoon classes end at 6 instead of 4 or 5.)
• (Corollary 2: If I can't do that, insist that the early-morning classes are the most useless and expendable in the entire curriculum.)
• It's good to end class with a game. It reminds the students why they took my class in the first place; it reinforces what we've learned during the class; and amount of time spent on the game can shrink or expand based on how fast we got through the rest of the content.
• It's good to ask students lots of questions and keep them engaged throughout. As time goes on, I'll learn to spend less time speaking and more time asking good questions and then moderating the conversation. (Should be a useful skill if I ever moderate a GDC roundtable.)

Culture Shock: Information Sharing between Peers

When I was working at a game company, there were always a lot of people looking for information. Different people would read Gamasutra, GameDailyBiz, Game Developer Magazine, or any number of other websites, blogs and publications.

If you found something interesting, you would generally send it around to the other people at your company who might also find it interesting. Usually this meant one Game Designer would send an article on Game Design to all the other Game Designers, but there was no rule against crossing departmental boundaries; maybe an Artist would find an incomprehensible document on Graphics Programming, and forward it on to the Programming department.

And this was fine. We're all on the same team. If you find something that helps another teammate do their job better, you get social points for it.

As a teacher, I find myself continuing to do this out of habit. I hear a story on NPR about indie bands and I mention it to the professor who teaches audio production. I see an article on game writing and forward it on to the professor who teaches nonlinear storytelling.

And it just occurred to me, after half a year of doing this, that I've never received anything like that from anyone else on the faculty.

Maybe it's just that no one I work with is actually keeping tabs on the game industry as much as I am, or that everyone else is too busy to be thinking about it. But I'm wondering if there isn't a different culture in academia -- it feels less like we're a team, after all -- and maybe when I do this it's construed as me telling my colleagues how to do their job, or implying that they need my help or something. Not my intention at all, of course, but I have to wonder.

Students: Reading between the lines

For many companies, especially large ones and especially those that are public, a lot of attention is given to PR, corporate image, etc. that leads to a tendency to try and appear perfect. Every public statement is whitewashed, the language sanitized for their protection.

This causes interesting conflicts within the game industry. One conflict commonly cited is game reviews by magazines: it's tough to write a negative review when the game's publisher is taking out a full-page ad for the same game in the same magazine.

Another conflict that's more immediately relevant to students is the stuff they read online, particularly Gamasutra's post-mortems of projects. A large game publisher might not want to air their dirty laundry, saying everything that went wrong on the project that's currently selling in stores. As such, one has to read the "what went wrong" section very carefully to get to the real story of what happened.

It's particularly fun when you can be your own example, as I'm finding out now for the first time. A student pointed out to me that GameTap's Rick Sanchez had responded to my letter criticizing his treatment of episodic content in games. The man works for GameTap, so he clearly can't say anything negative about their business model; yet, he says that he agrees with some of my points, so a student following this dialogue would have to expertly read between the lines to decide what Rick really thinks. And that's a skill worth having.

Emergent Design: The Generic Genre

In the industry, you're often focused on a specific genre of game, not thinking about the broad spectrum of games as a whole. So perhaps it takes a student's eye to spot larger industry trends.

Such it was today in class, when my Game Design students came to the conclusion that you could make a "kart racing" game for any IP, any license at all... while still respecting the original story. We were unable to find an exception. It would seem to be an entirely generic genre.

Teaching: Tradeoff between ease of grading, ease of cheating

It occurred to me that as I make homework assignments easier for myself to grade, I also make it easier for students to cheat on them.

At one end of the scale there's multiple-choice questions which are absolutely trivial to copy, and impossible for me to prove any shenanigans unless I use high-powered statistical software.

At the other end of the scale is an original essay, which is basically impossible to copy without it being obvious (I can even type key phrases into Google to check for copying from outside sources), but original works take at least half an hour to grade each... which adds up in a 30-person class.

I want to narrow the scope of the essays, perhaps even reducing them to bullet-point lists, next time I teach the class. But now I'm realizing that the more time I save on grading, the more time I have to put into making the assignment cheat-proof, so I'm not sure if I can actually save time at all.

Teaching: Teacher as Game Designer?

With the second offering of my Game Industry Survey course, I reworded a few of the homework assignments to make it clearer what I was looking for, based on confusion from the first offering.

Sure enough, the new crop of students is better at providing what I asked for, because my documentation was clearer.

Now I'm starting to wonder if this is entirely positive. In game development, clear specs that leave nothing to the programmers' imaginations is considered a good thing, because you're trying to make a game that's true to the designers' vision. But in a classroom, removing the students' room for creativity teaches them that they should be prepared to accept clean, detailed specs and follow instructions... not exactly the skills I want to pass on to the next generation of game designers.

In a way, if I treat homework assignments as design documents, my students end up getting better grades... but perhaps not learning as much.

Teaching: Teachers as Marketing (?!)

Normally I don't just link to the post on some other blog (I'd rather make my own content, thanks) but this article was too relevant to pass on. In brief: marketers spend their time trying to get your brain to pay attention and learn their message (something that teachers could do better at), and teachers spend their time transferring actual, useful information (something marketers could do better at). Sounds like a good idea to me.

I would add game designers into the mix; their entire purpose in life is to take a game and make it Fun (whatever "Fun" means).

So, teachers could learn from game designers: how to take this "Learning" and make it Fun. (Or rather, since learning is inherently fun -- especially in the case of game development classes -- how to take this "Learning" and not suck the inherent Fun out of it.)

Marketers could learn from game designers: how to take your advertising product and make it fun. Interactive advergames that concentrate too much on product marketing end up not being very fun, and thus losing their message.

Game designers can learn from marketers: all that brain research on how to get the brain to pay attention seems rather handy. As it is, we're still stuck with Csikszentmihalyi's 17-year-old research.

Game designers can learn from teachers: if you have some kind of greater social message you want to include in your game, how can you do it without beating your player over the head with the message in every cut scene? Especially useful for those working on training games, advergames or other "serious games" that are more than just entertainment.

Culture Shock: Textbook Evaluations

There were definitely times as a game developer when I'd have "I can't believe I'm actually getting paid to do this" moments.

The other day, I receive an email from a textbook publisher asking me to fill out a survey on one of their books; they're considering a new edition and they want to know what teachers think of the current one. I happen to already have a copy, so it doesn't involve any extra time on my part to evaluate the thing -- I did that months ago.

So, I'm offered a complimentary copy of the book that I already have (hello, ebay), plus another book of my choice, plus a small amount of cash. In exchange for the privilege of letting a textbook company know how their products can be better modified to serve me, and knowing that they'll actually listen. Twist my arm, why don't you!

I never had this in the game industry. No one ever came to me as a programmer and said "here, we'll pay you to tell us what new features to implement in the next version of Visual Studio". No one approached me as a designer saying "we'd like to give you this complimentary copy of our mind-mapping software, just let us know if you find it useful." It's an entirely different dynamic.

Teaching: Student mistakes

To my Game Industry Survey students, most of the topics we cover are completely foreign concepts. When I ask them to research and present a topic in class, it's only natural that mistakes will be made; this is new material for them, and they have no way of knowing what's vitally important and what's a minor detail.

On the other hand, they really should know the important details by the end of the class. A simple slip like asking a game developer if they have any openings in "Q&A" will pretty much end the conversation right there.

So, when a student says Richard Garriott is otherwise known as "King British," part of me wants to be lenient because they did get the general idea, and they were clearly trying. And then part of me wants to take 50% off their grade, because I'm pretty sure that saying something like that at GDC is grounds for ejection from the premises. I'm still trying to figure out what's fair. (I suppose I could split the difference, being lenient in the presentation and then asking about it during the final exam...)

I should be clear that I mean no disrespect towards the guilty party; this is one example of many. I chose it because I felt it would resonate best with my readers who are game developers.

I will say that I visibly wince when something like this happens in class. I can't help it, it's a natural reflex. Maybe seeing that is punishment enough.

Speaking at GDC

It's official. I'll enjoy five of my fifteen minutes of fame on Tuesday, March 6.

I'll present my final exam from the Fall, condensed down to five minutes, during the International Case Blasts session. It's part of the IGDA Education SIG Curriculum Workshop.

I'm really excited to be able to share my experience with other game educators. If any readers will be at GDC this year for the full five days, drop by and say hi after the session!