MDST4510 — Spring, 2023
How do we create games that can impact the world?
This course is geared around the design of play — learning how to design and iterate designs, focusing on games and other playful media considered broadly. In this class, students will gain experience developing multiple games for multiple platforms (digital and physical; ranging from video games to tabletop role-playing games), while also critically evaluating game design discourses. Each section of this course will focus primarily on a different genre of game (interactive fiction, platformer, role-playing game, VR game, augmented reality game, etc.) or a different use of games (for learning, for political persuasion, for entertainment) with connections made to other genres.
For this section, we will focus on games for impact — designing games intended to impact the world. Using games and playful media, we will engage with stories and systems to create systems intended to help teach, to help learn, to drive awareness for an issue, to provide political commentary, and/or to work toward social justice. As we develop our skills in designing within this approach to games, we will also be engaging with the tensions between narrative and game systems, designer discourses on design, as well as critical discourses on these media.
No experience with games is necessary! We will design multiple games in small groups, utilizing multiple approaches to design. In the second half of the term, students will individually or in pairs pick flesh out a complete prototype. Atop this, student groups will be encouraged to dive into student interests, seeking out a local University or community group to help their game achieve its impact goals.
Throughout, we will engage with “games for impact” considered quite loosely — we’ll look at games intended to be used in schools, games that had entertainment intent that were repurposed for learning, games that serve as political agitprop, games that attempt to promote social issues, etc.
Course readings will draw from some of these texts (in full or in selections):
Computer Science students are encouraged to petition for this course to count toward the Computer Science integration elective. Students with programming experience will be pushed to utilize those experiences in their designs. All students will be expected to delve into game design in multiple ways as well as critically evaluating gameplay throughout the term, though the vast majority of these initial game design experiences require no programming knowledge. Most importantly, students will need to be comfortable playing each others’ games as well as sharing their own creative work throughout the term. Students will learn how to provide and receive critique on playful designs throughout the term.
As this is a capstone course, the end of the term will involve students creating and sharing a full, playable prototype and this will be the bulk of the student grade (along with a short written component that connects the design experience back to course readings). Students’ designs will need to be justified with appeals to research (which you will encounter throughout the term and will be encouraged to seek out). And students will have the opportunity to find and choose topics that matter to them, and explore those in these final projects. You can see this as an opportunity to “flesh out” ideas encountered in other Media Studies coursework and to make something implementable for an individual media portfolio.
For further information, please contact Dr. Duncan at sean.duncan@virginia.edu.