Two Classes on Game Design

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Yeah, so it looks like I’ve got an exciting week coming up. (I also think I sort of broke the “s” key on my laptop’s keyboard — it sometimes doesn’t trigger when I hit it. And until I have evidence to the contrary, I’m going to blame the cat. But that’s an issue for another day.)

So. I’m leading two classes next week, in two very different educational contexts. On Tuesday, I’m doing my first day of a class called “Play” — an eight-week summer class for high school kids about game design. Then on Thursday I’m doing a talk over at General Assembly on my usual subject of the past year-or-so, game design and social media. A couple hours with 9th and 10th graders. A couple hours with industry people. I’m expecting that by Friday I will have another interesting blog post rarin’ to go…

Anyway. Let’s take these one by one.

Tuesday. I’m honestly most nervous about this one. I’ve done professional talks before, and they’re fairly nerve-wracking (especially Ignite — yes). But. I essentially know my audience, I know what they want, and I can at least predict how I think they’re going to respond to me. For example, I know I can go and talk for about an hour straight on a fairly esoteric topic and people will sit there and politely lend me their ears (I hope). I will be confident that I can just blab what’s on my mind and people will be basically on my same page a far as context. We’re all social media players, we know what the big issues and common complaints of the day are, we know most of the same memes. We all spend our days sitting in front of the same internet.

But. I do not think this is going to be the case on Tuesday, with this group of kids. Now, I expect them to be reasonably tech-savvy. In fact, I sat in on fifteen-twenty minutes of Andrew “Mr. Drozd” Drozd’s computer class last Wednesday and got a taste of what their level of sophistication is. Just saying this makes me feel like grandpa, but: They’re already well beyond where the average high schooler was when I was in high school. Granted, there’s way more stuff for them to explore — I’m not saying my peers were tech-dumb. But I think these kids will have a basic knowledge of what, say, Facebook is and how social networking online works. They might even have some programmer-mindset sorts of mental stuff going on — I’m sort of convinced that if you enjoy using technology at a young enough age there’s almost no way you can’t develop a programmer’s mentality about computers. As you explore and push the boundaries of Facebook, for example, you’ll get to understand computer logic and flow and how things fit together conceptually. I think. Maybe I’ll be wrong, here. Which is part of the reason I’m so excited to teach this — I just want to see how kids use technology. I know how tech nerds use technology.

I’m also hoping that this “programmer mindset” thing is happening with some of these kids simply because I think the game designer mentality is very, very similar. Game design is all about creating complex and purposeful systems and making sure those system work as intended, while making sure there are no holes or exploits that will break them or make them un-fun. You may not need to explicitly know what a for-loop is, but you do need to be able to mentally run through many, many “what ifs” and think about how the players are going to interactive with whatever you create.

So, yeah. I think this first class on Tuesday will be a couple of things. The biggest: Simply me feeling them out so I can get a read on what their mindset about gaming is already. They play games. That I’m confident of. They doubtless play many more games than they even realize, and I think game design is also a very interesting subject to talk to kids about because it’s quite possible that they play more different games for longer periods of time than almost any adult does. They probably play sports. Basketball or baseball or whatever. And some Xbox. (Maybe too much Xbox.) And they seem to have Facebook accounts, so I’d be surprised if some weren’t into social games like Farmville. No doubt they get distracted while online and find casual games to mess with, as well. They might play board games. Checkers? Chess? There’s probably some casual gambling of some sort happening. Who knows. But this is the kind of stuff I want to get a read on. Before I do, I don’t think I can make any sort of concrete plan of action for the coming weeks.

I’ve also found a handful of online games for us to play together (with special thanks to the fine folks at ask.Metafilter for their many suggestions). I don’t think we’ll get through them all, and I’m really hoping that they’ll have some games in mind to play in class — but I’ll list ‘em here, anyway. Maybe you’ll find something you enjoy. These are, by the way, games I’m hoping they can play in five or ten minutes and get the essence of the experience.

Casual games:

• Canabalt
• Bejeweled

Strategy games:

• Desktop Tower Defense

Games as art or personal expression:

• Passage
• Every Day the Same Dream

Cooperative games:

• Fire Boy & Water Girl

Puzzlers:

• notpron. (Although, jeez — a name like that makes me nervous about using it in class.)

Anyway — you may know much better examples of these kinds of games (or other kinds of games I’m missing altogether). Hit me up in the comments, please, if you have ideas. But you get where I’m kind of going. And I hope to take the class through a few of these games during our couple of hours.

One final comment: The part that makes me the most nervous is simply the possibility that some kids just won’t care. That I’ll have to fight to get some to pay attention or that I’ll be exhausted just keeping conduct in line or whatever. I’m going into this assuming that the topic will be enticing enough that I can rely on the kids being fairly interested. If nothing else, if I sense that I’m losing them, I can totally switch gears. It’s nice not having to teach against a prescribed curriculum. But we’ll see.

It’s all a big experiment.

And then, yeah: Thursday. At General Assembly.

So Mike Dory put Brad Hargreaves over there in touch with me (thanks!) — they wanted someone to come talk about game design, I’m always willing to talk about game design, so here we are. The talk has been put together quickly, but I’ve been pondering this topic long enough that I kind of had a nice set of points I knew I wanted to make.

I’m talking about how game design impacts social media design. My grouchy pitch: I’m really tired of all of this “gamification” crap because it’s vastly oversimplifying why game design is so important for people who design other kinds of interactive products. So many people seem caught up in their points and badges — 90% inspired by Foursquare, it feels like. And there’s been this happy-hippie GAMES WILL SAVE THE WORLD thread of conversation which I’m getting tired of because it’s letting people who don’t really have much to say grab everyone’s attention simply and get everyone all excited by just listing all of the things that we can now suddenly fix with a few simple game mechanics: Global warming! Solved. The economy! Fixed. Social inequality! Easy-cheezy. Education! Fixed over my lunch break.

Obviously I’m kind of overstating the case, but I do thing there’s tremendous room in here for a much more nuanced conversation about game design and interactive design. I’m hardly a ground-breaking genius on the subject of either games or social media, but I think I have the right attitude and I’m hoping that I can at least try to point some people in the right direction. It’s all about opening up people’s minds to possibilities. My own, included. I love doing talks mostly because of the amount of research and thinking I am forced to do leading up to them. Even if they cancelled the actual talk, it would be worth it for me.

Brad had me tone down some of the bitchiness in my talk description — with good reason. I promise: My talk will not full of complaints. And even though I get snarky about some game designers when they get all starry-eyed about this sort of stuff, I’m very pleased that this line of conversation has become popular. I do think there’s a lot to learn, here, and I appreciate the idea of people having this conversation amongst themselves — even if they’re sometimes amateurs or just people shooting the shit.

Anyway. More on that later, as well. I’m going to post my talking notes online as I did with my SXSW 2010 talk.

It’s 2am.

Goodnight.