One specific concept that resonated with me as a young student then was the ubiquity and diversity of meaning in culture. We studied sacred texts, sacred artifacts, and sacred ritual always in the context of religious communities, careful always to take pains to understand to the best of our ability how and why they were meaningful, not in an abstract sense, but as parts of people’s lives. The study of religion, different in some ways from theology, is fundamentally anthropological, as religion is always rooted in the lives of the practitioners. The very concept of “meaning” and “meaningfulness” is deliciously broad, abstract, nearly meaningless, complex, and, at times, vexingly so. Studying religion, I was thrown headfirst into the deep end of  the semiotic and sociolinguistic pool, and it was challenging to stay afloat. I was buoyed by excellent professors who reminded me that the search for meaning in religion was not a puzzle to be solved, but a painting to be viewed, a song to be heard, a space explored. Religion is not so easily decoded, the signification not one-to-one, and polysemy is the norm.

Games people — designers, academics, aca-designers, bloggers, tweeters, journalists — all seem to talk and write about meaning often. Meaning spurs the liveliest debates, stokes the hottest fires, but what does it mean for a game to be meaningful?

Some game design-focused folks write about meaning and meaningfulness in games in terms of systems of cause and effect. Meaning, for them, is when any action leads to change. An action that does not change the state of the machine, the system of the game (digital or otherwise), is considered at best “less meaningful” and at worst “meaningless.”  To complicate matters, even if an action does have a systemic outcome, if that change is not communicated through feedback somehow, it becomes a “less meaningful” action.

Frank Lantz recently wrote about what he sees as a problem with voting in large-scale elections. He writes, “The essential problem is that, in a group of a million or more people my individual vote doesn’t have a meaningful impact on the outcome.” Lantz suggests that an individual not voting, or even switching a single vote, would not change the outcome. He continues “The impact of your individual vote is so small compared to the scale of the overall election that it is utterly insignificant.” Coming from the perspective of an academic and as an experienced designer, he points out, “This should trigger your game designer alarm system, because one of our important jobs is making systems where choices and actions do matter. Meaningful actions and meaningful choices are the bread and butter of good game design, so when we see a choice that doesn’t matter we should want to take a closer look.”

Lantz got critiqued pretty hard on twitter and online for this blog post, and somewhat unfairly. I think in the full post he does point out that voting is performative, and that some of the meaning of voting comes from “expressing idealized versions of our values” which makes us feel good. While he’s somewhat pessimistic about this part of the process, he does consider the experience of voting outside the mechanical system of the electoral process. At the heart of Lantz’s criticism of the voting process, however, is the belief that if actions don’t deliver discernable changes to the system, they suffer a loss of meaning.

The popular Rules of Play, which is a must-read text on game design, has quite a long section on the subject of meaning and meaningful play with games. Salen and Zimmerman emphasize the importance of meaning to game design, writing and repeating “the goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play.” For the two designers, meaningful play in games is also very much tied to the notion of cause and effect, in and between what they call “actions” and “outcomes.” They describe two kinds of meaningful play, descriptive and evaluative, with the former residing in the relationship between the action and the outcome, and the latter functioning on a second order, when the relationship between actions and outcomes are discernable and integrated into the context of the game. Like Lantz’s post, I do not believe that Rules of Play ever suggests that meaning cannot exist beyond the construct of cause and effect, between actions and outcomes. Good designers, as all three authors are, understand the complexity and multi-dimensionality of meaningful experiences with games.

But the post, and the passages from Rules of Play, do exemplify a concern I have about a shift in our understanding of meaning and meaningfulness in games. Perhaps because the vocabulary and theorizing around the design of games is somewhat new, or perhaps because of the emergence of computation and digital games, the concept of “meaningful” seems to have been conflated with “consequential,” and that collapse gives me pause. I have spent the bulk of my academic life looking for, and trying to remain open to meaning. Studying religion, I embraced plurality in meaning (ironically enough given that so many of the ills of religion in society are born from the rigidity of dogma). I accept, and know full well, from my limited experience as a designer, that consequence and feedback are important principles of games. Prayer, or silent communal worship, depending on who you ask, may not be a very good game. But I reject wholly any suggestion that those experiences are somehow less meaningful because of a lack of immediate consequence or immediate feedback.

Of course games are polysemous, and of course games have meaning in the systems, and around them. I spend much of my time thinking about sports, that very old category of games for which examples of the diversity of meaning are both obvious and abundant. When Jesse Owens out-jumped, and out-ran everyone at the Berlin olympic games in 1936, it had consequence, he won medals. But as Owens, an African-American competing and winning in Nazi Germany, stood at the medal podium, it also had, and still has meaning. When the Red Sox overcame a 3-0 game deficit in the 2004 American League Championship Series, beating the Yankees in four straight games and moving on to win the World Series, it had consequence, the Red Sox were champions. It also had, and still has meaning, the Red Sox, at last, were champions. When Bobby Fischer, at the ripe age of 13, sacrificed his queen to to Donald Byrne, his actions had consequence, he went on to win The Game of the Century. With his victory was an abundance of meaning, emanating from the events of the game, and wrapped in the context of the world and culture in which the game was played.

Voting may not have immediate or direct consequence, and certainly not the consequence that is often promised of it. But voting, as many others pointed out after Lantz’s post, does have gobs of meaning. Games are often designed to have systems wherein actions have consequence, but this is certainly not the only, or even the most common way for games to have meaning.

I want to be very clear, nobody, and especially not the authors quoted in this post, is suggesting or has suggested that games aren’t meaningful for lots of reasons, and in many ways. I am not trying to make straw-people of them, or trying to be overly reductive of their arguments. This post is responding to an ideology I’ve occasionally noticed that can be characterized by those examples — in which “meaning” is eroded, conceptually reduced to a measure of cause and effect.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily pedantic, bothered so by semantics.

Of course, we are talking about meaning here, right?

Some of you may have caught the preview of the updated “Alpha” build of Hokra last week, which was made available to backers of Sportsfriends on Kickstarter. We noted some changes to the game that should have a visible effect on competitive play, particularly the no-dash tackle, which often results in both aggressive and defensive “dancing” on the field and makes it much harder for the ball-carryer to juke in the scoring zone. The speed of the players and ball also seem zippier, and the lower default game resolution of 720p should feel familiar to players from the 2011 No Quarter exhibition.

Since there aren’t any classes on Friday, feel free to swing by 35-225 at 4pm to get in a little warm-up practice. You can still register your team if you want in! Join us in person or watch our semiprofessional live broadcast and score ticker via Twitch.

As a genre of software, demos initially gained widespread distribution by being the first thing you would see when loading a “cracked” copy of a computer game. Witnessing a burst of digital graffiti on boot-up was an inextricable part of the experience of gaming on no budget, and any computer-enabled kid in the 80′s quickly became familiar with the signatures of mysterious programmers and their synthesized anthems. Sophisticated and dazzling, demos split from their copy-protection roots to become a unique form of aesthetic expression, while finding audiences and kindred spirits in the LAN gaming, chiptune, maker, historical computing and academic hacker communities.

Hardware for exhibiting demo compos. @party 2010 photo by Jason Scott

This year, @party will showcase 3D-printed metal sculptures, oldschool and browser demos, interactive fiction and overhead projector entries, games, graphics, music, the ever-classic “intro” and the catchall “wild” competitions. MIT students, faculty, and staff can register for free. (Email the organizers for a discount code!)

Tammo “kb” Hinrichs, a game industry professional and organizing team member for several demoparties (with attendance as high as twelve hundred people!) came by the lab in October 2011. He gave an overview of what the demoscene is and presented on what the demoscene community has done in the past to contribute to his and others’ professional development and encourage the formation of new companies, such as game studios.

Register for @party 2013 here!

Join us at the MIT Game Lab this Friday, May 10 at 4:00pm and crash on our couch while we scheme and strategize, head-to-head and side-by-size. Warming up with a little Hokra while we test out the stream, we’ll be joined by visiting associate professor Mikael Jakobsson who will share some of his findings about adversarial co-op gameplay. Then we’ll get right into the winner of the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize in 2010, Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine. Both games feature gorgeous abstractions of space and delicate teamwork.

You also really need to have the controller in your hands to understand the critical acclaim heaped on both games. We’re on the MIT Campus in room 26-153, but you can also join us online via Twitch. Time to move some chunky pixels!

I want to say, first off, big thanks to co-organizer Zoe Quinn, to guest jammer Christine Love, and to the lab’s own Rik Eberhardt for all their hard work helping to make the jam a success. Also thanks to Brett Chalupa for setting up the BMO site that allowed for archiving and remote participation and such; I think it made a huge difference! If you haven’t been to said site, drop by http://quiltbag.herokuapp.com and look around to see the games that people submitted!

This was our second year doing an LGBTQ-themed game jam, and I was glad to see the event grow this year. Counting both the jammers who were here on the MIT campus and those people abroad who made games, we had a little over 20 participants (and possibly more I don’t know about!). Many people were cross-participating with that weekend’s Pulse Pounding Heart Stopping Dating Sim Jam, so that was also pretty great.

Rik made a great Storify of tweets from the jam and I suggest giving it a read-through. We had a number of different projects and team sizes; also we had a bunch of both first-time jammers and jammers who don’t ID on the queer spectrum but wanted to take part and I think both of those things are fantastic. Also this is the first year we had satellite participation and that is awesome. As I said at the time, waking up the day after the jam and looking at the site was like Christmas, seeing these awesome games I hadn’t known about until that moment and getting to play them.

Not everything went according to plan. On the list of things to consider changing for next year is scheduling (we were within a stone’s throw of PAX East and GDC, calendar-wise) and venue (we ended up in a room on MIT’s campus that was harder to get to for non-MIT people than I imagined). Hopefully we’ll sort these out for next time.

Also on the “for your consideration” block: I’m really glad Zoe was there, since she has a lot of experience running these kinds of events and I don’t. Most of what I know about game jams comes from the Global Game Jam style of affair which is how we ran things at last year’s Gayme Jam; it’s a little more regimented, with voting on projects and sorting into teams and the like. And that’s okay! For some jam contexts that works great. But at Zoe’s suggestion we ran the QUILTBAG Jam much more informally and the more I reflected on that the more necessary I think that decision was.

Why? I want to draw attention to some tweets of Courtney Stanton’s from the day of the jam itself:

…it’s so, so different to be in a room full of people designing and developing games when those people are assumed non-straight.

— Courtney Stanton (@q0rt) April 6, 2013

no offense straight people, but it’s just really neat to have someone go “so are people familiar with Hedwig?” and everyone goes “uh yeah”.

— Courtney Stanton (@q0rt) April 6, 2013

also to be able to say, “can we get some ambient Kesha playing?” and actually get it, without being given shit about it.

— Courtney Stanton (@q0rt) April 6, 2013

Those tweets right there really articulate part of why we wanted to have this sort of jam in the first place, and why I think the more stratified way of approaching jams that works for other jam contexts might not work so well for something like QUILTBAG Jam. I think what we really want to do with this sort of jam is make a space where people feel like they can play around with ideas about queerness in games. Part of that involves feeling like you’re in a safe space, where talking about/expressing these ideas won’t just be not criticized, but actively welcomed and encouraged. I want to think that we managed to accomplish that with this year’s jam.

It also says something that the first REAL thing we did, the non-mingling thing, was to play Crystal Warrior Ke$ha as a group, including Christine getting to the front of the room and reading the narrative with great passion while the crowd disagreed over which ways to be awesome. And after we were done, there was an energy in the room that ran all the way through the event. Darius Kazemi recorded the whole affair, and it’s worth listening to, believe me.

As for the games… I could gush about them forever but the best thing for you to do is go play them! We’ve got a range, from totally silly, to biting and hilarious social commentary, to some personal explorations of queerness and identity that hit pretty hard. We’ve got formats ranging from a set of board game rules, to Twine games, to a puzzle game made in Perlenspiel. That we got such a wide range out of the jam is really awesome, to me.

I wonder how we’re gonna top all this next year!

PS: Raghav Bashyal (@raghaaav on twitter), a game designer and student of games at USC, recently tweeted to let me know he’s hoping to set up a QUILTBAG Jam on their campus and is already reaching out to people at other California colleges to see if they will too. I can’t wait to see what they produce!

PPS: If you’re interested, we devoted an entire Friday Games to looking through the various QBJ games:

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/doniree/

When I first volunteered to write a blog post, I had this marvelous idea: I was going to lay out a series of easy tips on how to increase diversity in your game design. My mental image of it was maybe a little extravagant, and maybe fueled a bit by how I view the relationship between “professional” game design and what game academics and critics have to offer that. I really did think it would be great if I could answer that seemingly all-important call for “practical” advice, where what game devs really want are concrete steps they can take during their process to put these pie-in-the-sky ideas we scholars dig up into everyday use. I’m being a little flippant there, but this isn’t 100% far from the truth. And so I thought, yeah: I have an investment in games being more diverse, and media representation is one of my areas of expertise. I can do this. I’ll do a top ten list! Simple things you can do to help make a more diverse game.

The truth is, when I went to write that very blog post this past week, it was hard. Much harder than I’d imagined, and not for lack of ideas for the “tips.” I had plenty of those. I even went to Twitter and asked others for their thoughts on what those tips should be… and since this post has ended up heading in a different direction, let me thank those people who responded right now. I appreciate you sharing those thoughts with me. But it was the “hey, let’s turn this into a practical step” effort that was tripping me up. And the more I wrote, and the more examples I tried to write, the more self-doubt was coloring my process. What was I doing? Who was this helping?

I spent some time reflecting on my doubts and I think I’m going to answer my own question in the form of this revised post.

To start, I’ll share the very first tip I wrote with you: “Take the risk.” I still stand behind this one. In any sort of media creation — TV, games, movies, whatever — including things that don’t match up to the power structures of the day is perceived as a risk. It’s a risk that comes from an imagined audience, a perceived culture; sometimes those imagined things are conjured through numbers that market research provides us and sometimes they come from inside our own heads as people who live in the world. “Hegemony” as a Marxist term refers to a power structure that is constructed through consent, after all. If we think the world is full of cisgendered middle class straight white Christians then creating something that they might not like — and thus might not “buy” for multiple definitions of the term — is “risky.” You might not recoup your investment. I hasten to add that, rhetorically, the opposite of this situation is “safe,” as in “a safe bet.”

What I realized as I wrote was that I was trying to find a way for game developers — people often working in the extremes of finances, either struggling to produce with little to no funds or being responsible for untold amounts of production capital — to “be more diverse” without taking too much risk. My very first commandment was to encourage people to step outside their comfort zones and then everything I wrote seemed like it was encouraging people to do that in very safe, very controlled ways. I was betraying my own principle from the get go, effectively saying “Take a risk! But safely.”

Now, I personally have a relatively conservative personality. I’m more inclined to compromise than to be a radical and I have an attachment to the idea of balance, e.g. that we need a little of [x] and a little of [y] and that complementary opposition is philosophically and culturally valuable. I’m saying all this because I think it explains why I was doing this awful thing I just described. But hilariously, I was stopping myself coming from the other direction, too. I wanted to reference some queer games critiques and texts and held back for fear of upsetting them. I myself have no small amount of privilege — I identify as a cisgendered male, I’m white, I’m middle-class and able-bodied — and I began to wonder if that was keeping me from seeing the big picture. I became so concerned with not upsetting anyone too much that I was shying away from the mission of the thing that I had set out to do.

Does this sound like a familiar scenario?

I hope that when friends and colleagues in both academia and the industry read this, they’ll forgive my excesses, but the revised version of my original plan for this post is: Suck it up and take the risk.

I can hear the objections now: “But the market won’t support that!” “I’m not sure I can do it right; I’m worried about offending someone.” “You haven’t made a game/you’re not in the business; you don’t understand the process. It’s not that simple.”

I am here to tell you that the people you are not representing do not particularly care that making diverse games is risky or hard, because in ways both big and small, BEING those people is risky and/or hard. Having to hide/lie about your gender or sexuality to avoid abuse, being a woman living terrified everyday in a patriarchial rape culture, being a person of color denied opportunities in all realms of life solely on the basis of ethnicity or background… these are not easy. Navigating the world of privilege is risky and the distance you can fall is steep indeed.

More to the point, when I see these objections, I have to ask: how bad do you want it? Are you interested in making a woman or a person of color the hero of your action-platformer game, but only up to the point that someone in marketing says no? If that’s the case, I’d ask you to re-evaluate your commitment to the idea. This is maybe a stereotyped example, but I chose it precisely for its illustrative properties. At some point, if you are interested — REALLY INTERESTED — in adding diversity to your game then you are going to have to fight for it. You are going to have to tell people who want to take the safe bet that the “risk” is the better option, and I’m using the Quotes of Dubiousness on the word “risk” for a reason.

If you’re asking yourself “How do I do this, though?” then I’m going to ask in return: how would you fight for ANY risky, controversial idea? Think for five seconds about the last time you had an idea that you knew wasn’t going to be popular, but which you were excited and passionate for. You did some research, you talked your ideas over with people, you molded it and shaped it and then you brought it to a meeting and with every ounce of that passion for your risky idea you sold people on it. You made them believe.

Well, guess what: that’s what you’ve got to do here, too. You’ve got to have some of that passion. You’ve got to believe in the moral good. If you don’t, then you’re going to get hedged into taking the safe bet every time, and the story of this blog post is proof of that. The passion I needed to make a statement wasn’t with my original plan, and once I found it again the shape of this blog post changed. And more to the point, think about what’s worth fighting for. If you’re willing to go to bat with your dev team and upper management for six new sexy alternte DLC costumes for minor NPCs but give up at the first sign of resistance to having a non-awful major transgender character, I admit some concern about your priorities.

The world is changing. Gaming is changing. The markets are certainly changing, if that’s your thing. The massive groundswell of advocacy and diversity efforts that arose at GDC this year, events like the recently-held Different Games conference… they are proof that this imagined world that creates the “safe bet” is a phantom, a dying echo. This is the perfect time for people with passion to take the risks that I’m talking about, to prove that this imagined lie we’ve been catering to for so long is nothing BUT a lie. But you’ve got to want it. You’ve got to believe in it, because that’s what powers the fight. And you will have to fight, but it will be worth it.

I don’t have 10 easy tips to give you because there is no such list. There is only the commandment to take the risk, to gather up your passion and your courage and to fight back against the safe bet. It is difficult and sometimes you will stumble and fail and sometimes you will offend and you know, that’s fine. The important thing is that every time you fight the fight, every time you put yourself on the line for the ideal, that line that determines what’s a safe bet and what’s a risk gets pushed just a little farther forward… and that’s a goal worth accomplishing.

Andrew Grant, our Technical Director, will be talking about and playing the games that have inspired him to make “Lex Laser Saves the Galaxy, Again” a game that he’s calling a tactical puzzle RPG for busy people.

Some of the games we’ll talk about and play are Robots, Gauntlet, Rogue, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons, SSI’s Gold Box games, HERO System, Star Control II, Star Saga, and maybe even FTL (again!).

From his description of the game:

Lex Laser is the lone conscript who fought off 300 zologs in the Battle of Hilbert 5. Lex Laser is the only human to have been made an honorary member of the Vkesti Immortal Council. Lex Laser released, caught, survived, and cured the final outbreak of Smallpox IV. Lex Laser dug up a fortune in alien artifacts in the asteroids around Rigel – and lost it all three days later.

It’s hard to be a living tall tale. Despite the fame, or perhaps because of it, Lex Laser just wants to be left alone. Lex Laser doesn’t want to save the galaxy, but sometimes, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that’s when you have to act.

You are Lex Laser’s combat implant, the secret of his/her success. Lex Laser may be an expert technician, spaceship mechanic, and sometime scientist, but when the going gets tough, you take over.

You direct Lex Laser in a 2d game world. Lex Laser will be fighting hordes of zarbats, mining explosive crystals, running away from angry robots, looting a scuttled dreadnaught, or exploring an alien ruin, and more.

Join us at the MIT Game Lab this Friday, May 3 at 4:00pm — either in person at 26-153 or online via Twitch.tv.

The MIT Business in Gaming (BiG) conference took place here at the MIT campus a few weeks ago, organized by the MIT Sloan Business in Gaming Club. It was a pretty interesting event not without its share of controversial statements, as one could expect from a gathering of people discussing what the future of the gaming industry is going to look like.

While there were many trends and patterns discussed throughout the day, one of the most interesting discussions came about early in the day regarding models for funding game companies and game projects. This is a brief recap of the ideas shared during the panel, which certainly deserve some more discussion and commentary.

The opening panel on funding models for games drew quite a lot of attention from a room packed with up and coming developers scouting for the right model for their projects. The panel included a breadth of diverse experiences including Dave Bisceglia from The Tap Lab, Seth Alte from Subaltern Games, Nabeel Hyatt from Spark Capital and Cindy Au from Kickstarter. The different perspectives led to a good debate around what the best model is from someone thinking about starting a game project or a game company and what their various options are depending on their goals and the level of maturity of their project.

One of the most helpful distinctions the panel shared was that getting funding for a game involved very different strategies and resources than trying to get funding for a game company. With all the attention crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter have been getting lately, it is becoming more and more attractive as an option for beginning game designers, but while Kickstarter can be very effective when you have a specific product you’re interested in building – a game – it is not as helpful when you’re thinking about something different. The crowdfunding model has not been as effective for people trying to get funding for a company, a gaming platform or a series of games, rather than a single title, and other models of funding such as angel investors or venture capital (when not bootstrapping the entire project) might be better suited to such larger endeavors. This, however, is not necessarily an either/or proposition: it is now more and more the case that developers interested in going beyond their original projects can bank on successful Kickstarter campaigns as a measure of both the interest their projects are able to generate; and evidence of their capacity to not only build games, but of bringing together communities around them willing to contribute funding. Initial success with crowdfunding can then become helpful when thinking about taking an operation to scale and going after other sources of capital.

Crowdfunding is not a model that fits everyone, though – the success of a crowdfunding campaign must necessarily look beyond the “if you build it, they will come” syndrome that assumes that a nice project will draw attention by itself. It won’t. Platforms such as Kickstarter are more than just about funding: they’re an opportunity to engage in conversations with potential communities, to build an audience and get attention even before a product is complete, and to a large extent, to experiment with various engagement models and find the right fit for the project. Not all communities react the same way to the same interactions. But this experimentation takes time away from the development effort and can often go overlooked and unattended for people heavily focused on their projects. It then becomes a challenge for people working independently to strike a balance between building their game and building the community of support they need to get the funding they need to complete it, and the attention they’ll later need to distribute it.

For those banking their success on these platforms, however, it is wise to remember that maintaining their “indie cred” becomes incredibly important. People investing in projects over Kickstarter are looking for that personal, community connection, and a feeling of involvement in the project. Being very polite and attentive all the time becomes the baseline from which designers can grow healthy communities of support.

An interesting challenge for game companies seeking an ongoing investment model is that while a web startup can demo and even commercialize and incomplete app over which they can later iterate and improve, this is often not the case with games, which will usually have a harder time building revenue if the game is incomplete. In other words, it’s harder for a game to make money while being built, making them a somewhat harder sell to potential investors. There are, however, some mechanisms people are experimenting around this, using for example episodic releases whenever possible, or expansions as downloadable content, which enable a company to market an early version of the game and start collecting revenue early in the process while the remainder of the game is built.

Hokra Tournament – May 17th 5PM

That’s right we are hosting another awesome Hokra tournament at MIT this May. For those who don’t know, Hokra is a great 2 vs. 2 abstract multiplayer game that is very easy to just pick up and play. In fact, last year’s 2nd place team had never played the game before the tournament! So sign up and come on by for the fun.

Boston Festival of Indie Games – September 14, 2013

We are also helping out and hosting another Boston Festival of Indie Games. If you didn’t make it last year, it was an awesome event with lots of games to play and great people to meet. Definitely check it out and if you want to, you can support the event on Kickstarter.

@Party – June 14th-16th

@party, a demoscene event will be taking place at Stata on MIT’s campus from June 14th-16th. There are talks, competitions, lots of demonstrations, it is a wild event. Check it out!

FROG Conference – September 27, 28, 2013

The seventh annual FROG conference is taking place in Vienna, Austria and the Call for Papers is now out. It is an incredible games conference held in a beautiful building in an equally beautiful city. Follow the link to read more about this year’s theme “context matters” and to get details about submitting to or attending the conference.

Lex Laser Saves the Galaxy Again

A number of us here at the lab have started a side game project, Lex Laser Saves the Galaxy Again, and we have a Kickstarter up now to try to get the project off the ground. Our tech director Andrew Grant is leading the way, and the game is designed to cater to the schedules of busy people who have limited time to play games but still want engaging and deep game experiences. Head over to the Kickstarter page and watch the video read about the project!

Students worked in teams, varying in size from 2 to 5 people, on a total of four projects, learning the basics of working as a team on a complicated creative project. During the three two-week projects, we emphasized design iteration through rapid prototyping and directed focus testing, as well as agile project management techniques. For the two digital prototypes, we also taught and emphasized good coding practices. After cramming three separate small game projects into the first half of the semester, we gave the students the remaining time to work on their final project.

We required the students to form larger teams for the final projects, with a minimum team size of five. Teams were self organizing: we gave the students in class time to review all of the projects that had been done up to that point, and to choose any one of them to serve as the prototype for their final project. Different students evangelized for different projects; eventually, four teams formed, each working with a different prototype as their starting point.

From the starting project on, we required the players to make two person games, running on a single device. For the final project, our added requirement was to make a two person game that was entertaining to watch for a group of spectators as well as entertaining to play for the two players in the game.

Just as we required them to form their own teams, we also expected them to organize themselves. Team sizes ranged from six people to nine, and the rest of the class time was spent determining team structure, who would fill which roles, how the team would run its project management process, and which tools the team would use.

All teams had at least one member who had worked on the previous prototype, so they had access to the previous projects’s code. Some teams chose to start from scratch, reworking and revisiting the original prototype’s core ideas; others used the original code base, but took time to fix the inevitable coding errors left by the earlier project’s short timescale. In the end, we had four successful games: Gaveldor 2: The Engaveling of Ambidexteria, Psycho Bunnies, Magic Mecha Bear Puncher 9000, and Mouse vs. Mole. Rather than describe them here, you can watch the presentation video!