Design Mindsets
Game Design as a process…for the teacher and the student
I am a gamer, but my evolution as a gamer has coincided with teaching game design. I decided to have students design games just as I was getting into board gaming as a hobby, so as I have learned more about gaming and game design, so have I changed my approaches. I've been doing this for seven years.
My 13 year old middle school gifted students design strategy games over the course of a semester. We spend two months playing a wide variety of strategy games and analyzing theme, mechanics, and victory conditions. Then, students design their own. They spend about two months on their design and by the end, have created a complete prototype and rule set.
I am always tweaking how I teach game design, but this year I had a transformative moment. I went to the Midwest Education Technology Conference (www.metcconference.org) and I went to a session on creating fast prototypes. Since the creation of the prototype is always challenging to do quickly, I went. I am so glad I did!
One presenter did a shortened version of the Stanford d.school's Virtual Crash Course in design. We were paired up and followed a process of interviewing each other and developing the basis of an idea, then finally created prototypes using everyday materials like foil and popsicle sticks. The process was fun, but what really stuck with me was the d.school's design principles:
Bias towards action
Collaborate across boundaries
Focus on human values
Be mindful of process
Prototype towards a solution
Show, don't tell
I really thought about the process--what was effective, and what really wasn't. Prototyping and working with materials is effective because you can think of 500 ideas but only by actually trying them out can you see if they work or not. So I knew I wanted to keep that, obviously, but also to make it better.
I realized that I had my students spend so. much. time. writing about what they wanted to do with their games--writing about how to apply mechanics, researching their themes and writing down information that might be helpful, writing about different objectives, writing about different victory conditions. I realized that I needed to keep the written components about mechanics and theme, but objectives and victory conditions could wait. The reality is that most often, what my students wrote about ahead of always changed for objectives and victory conditions. So I decided to just focus on theme and mechanics because the objectives and victory conditions tend to develop more organically--they naturally arise as students work on the prototype.
So, we started prototyping weeks earlier than before, and now at the end of the semester, it was absolutely worth it. Because we focused just on theme and mechanics, students had a lot of flexibility to play around and try different ideas. Rarely students change theme, but adding or subtracting mechanics happens frequently. By committing to less on paper, they were able to try more ideas. The prototypes have seen a lot more physical development and play testing and I think the students liked it much better. I had two students who actually took my class twice, and they said that while they learned a lot the first time that they could apply, really it was the emphasis on prototyping that made their games better. As always, I am eternally surprised by the creativity and difficult choices my students make in developing their prototypes.
(This happens to me so much, Little Miss Best Intentions finally sees another way is better, and I'm just glad the nice folks at Stanford are kind enough to share their materials. (http://dschool.stanford.edu)
I think game design is the best thing that I've ever taught. My students love games and that hooks them from the start. The project is challenging in so many ways and gets harder, and more rewarding, with every step. Choosing the theme allows them to immerse themselves deeply into a subject that matters to them. Then, by focusing on mechanics and victory conditions, they must think deeply about the experience they are trying to create for their players. Writing the ruleset is the next level of challenge because they must distill their ideas into a cogent, functional set AND then explain it so others can have the same experience in playtesting. After a cycle of playtesting and refinement, students create a polished prototype and we publish the results here for all the world to see.
The project requires holistic, visual-spatial thinking as well as analytical, sequential thinking. They must design the game they want while keeping what gamers want and need in mind. They have to be creative on deadlines and manage their time in class to determine their own courses of action. I never let students design a game with a partner because at the end of class, each student has full ownership of everything in their box--all 8,000 decisions are theirs forever.
I am a gamer, but my evolution as a gamer has coincided with teaching game design. I decided to have students design games just as I was getting into board gaming as a hobby, so as I have learned more about gaming and game design, so have I changed my approaches. I've been doing this for seven years.
My 13 year old middle school gifted students design strategy games over the course of a semester. We spend two months playing a wide variety of strategy games and analyzing theme, mechanics, and victory conditions. Then, students design their own. They spend about two months on their design and by the end, have created a complete prototype and rule set.
I am always tweaking how I teach game design, but this year I had a transformative moment. I went to the Midwest Education Technology Conference (www.metcconference.org) and I went to a session on creating fast prototypes. Since the creation of the prototype is always challenging to do quickly, I went. I am so glad I did!
One presenter did a shortened version of the Stanford d.school's Virtual Crash Course in design. We were paired up and followed a process of interviewing each other and developing the basis of an idea, then finally created prototypes using everyday materials like foil and popsicle sticks. The process was fun, but what really stuck with me was the d.school's design principles:
Bias towards action
Collaborate across boundaries
Focus on human values
Be mindful of process
Prototype towards a solution
Show, don't tell
I really thought about the process--what was effective, and what really wasn't. Prototyping and working with materials is effective because you can think of 500 ideas but only by actually trying them out can you see if they work or not. So I knew I wanted to keep that, obviously, but also to make it better.
I realized that I had my students spend so. much. time. writing about what they wanted to do with their games--writing about how to apply mechanics, researching their themes and writing down information that might be helpful, writing about different objectives, writing about different victory conditions. I realized that I needed to keep the written components about mechanics and theme, but objectives and victory conditions could wait. The reality is that most often, what my students wrote about ahead of always changed for objectives and victory conditions. So I decided to just focus on theme and mechanics because the objectives and victory conditions tend to develop more organically--they naturally arise as students work on the prototype.
So, we started prototyping weeks earlier than before, and now at the end of the semester, it was absolutely worth it. Because we focused just on theme and mechanics, students had a lot of flexibility to play around and try different ideas. Rarely students change theme, but adding or subtracting mechanics happens frequently. By committing to less on paper, they were able to try more ideas. The prototypes have seen a lot more physical development and play testing and I think the students liked it much better. I had two students who actually took my class twice, and they said that while they learned a lot the first time that they could apply, really it was the emphasis on prototyping that made their games better. As always, I am eternally surprised by the creativity and difficult choices my students make in developing their prototypes.
(This happens to me so much, Little Miss Best Intentions finally sees another way is better, and I'm just glad the nice folks at Stanford are kind enough to share their materials. (http://dschool.stanford.edu)
I think game design is the best thing that I've ever taught. My students love games and that hooks them from the start. The project is challenging in so many ways and gets harder, and more rewarding, with every step. Choosing the theme allows them to immerse themselves deeply into a subject that matters to them. Then, by focusing on mechanics and victory conditions, they must think deeply about the experience they are trying to create for their players. Writing the ruleset is the next level of challenge because they must distill their ideas into a cogent, functional set AND then explain it so others can have the same experience in playtesting. After a cycle of playtesting and refinement, students create a polished prototype and we publish the results here for all the world to see.
The project requires holistic, visual-spatial thinking as well as analytical, sequential thinking. They must design the game they want while keeping what gamers want and need in mind. They have to be creative on deadlines and manage their time in class to determine their own courses of action. I never let students design a game with a partner because at the end of class, each student has full ownership of everything in their box--all 8,000 decisions are theirs forever.