I’ll start off my week of late-bloggingTM GDC at the very beginning. Last Monday and Tuesday, the IGDA’s Education special interest group held a workshop based around the development of game curricula at academic institutions. The two-day event was completely booked. I got in with a press pass on Monday, but had to miss out on Tuesday’s festivities due to a conflict with my student scholar orientation.
The workshop? Invaluable. Considering it’s the topic of my senior project, it was nice having a room-full of people talking the talk. The most notable problem with the workshop was the attitude of some of the academics I found myself sitting near. Nick Fortugno led an excellent session on teaching game design essentials, which included a design exercise for the attendees to participate in. I was grouped with several academics, and we were told to augment the rules of an analog game to change the message.
Perhaps because I was the youngest, I felt essentially stepped upon by my “peers” in the group, and none of the ideas I offered were even considered. To make matters worse, I felt that the design of my team grew unwieldy in terms of its complexity and limited formal structure. The group felt content to suggest how the game “should” work, rather than actually design the mechanics accordingly. When I suggested playtesting, they ignored me. The whole experience felt very counter-productive. It concerns me that this is the current state of game design in education.
Aside from this minor setback, the sessions held were extremely worthwhile, and gave me pages of notes to work with for my thesis. As mentioned above, Nick Fortugno’s talk gave me a much stronger insight into how to develop in-class exercises for design, and served as a nice refresh on some design fundamentals. Tracy Fullerton also talked about the application of game design exercises in the classroom, focusing more on examples from various institutions. I also had the pleasure of meeting Ian Schreiber, a professor at Ohio University who’s been integrating game elements into his education process. All in all, a good first day to the conference experience.
Wow, this turned out to be a longer post than anticipated. I’ll continue late-bloggingTM, but with more commentary, less specificity next time.