Course Description

Games are a very popular medium, and have made a rather large impact on culture, but most people only ever consider as simple entertainment, child's play, or even as a big business, like Hollywood. Even many "art of games" discussions out there focus only on the aesthetics of increasingly realistic graphics. This course will introduce you to some of the medium's broader and deeper purposes—the arts of game design and analysis of game structure and meaning—by introducing you to a globally diverse selection of games and their impacts within and outside the world of entertainment. We'll see how game designers create dialogues with their players and the meanings these creations engage with in the larger world.

Games that seem plain are often much more when we look a second time: Monopoly, for instance, wasn't invented as a fun diversion but as a socialist manifesto illustrating the evils of concentrating land in private monopolies and to promote Henry George's single-tax theory. FoldIt is a game whose players conduct protein sequencing research en masse—crowd-sourced scientific research. Kissima Ingitchuna is a retelling of a traditional Innpiaq story, part documentary and part fiction. And even games that were invented and sold as pure entertainment have ended up having complex effects on our world. Roblox is one of the highest valued corporations in the world, built on the back of unremunerated minors who create the platform's games. Games are made to give us an inside look at the perils of AI run amok, the quantitative details of a world of finite resources, and much more everyday concerns like dealing with cancer or the complicated emotions stirred up by revisiting your family home. We'll even look at some of the ways game design and compulsive play has become a supercharged management ingredient in places like Amazon and Uber (and less effectively by schools), a rather dystopian 21st Century take on BF Skinner's behaviorist theories.

We will consider the inner life of games—the special sauce of this medium that makes it capable of something different than other art forms—as well as some of the broader impacts and uses of games, for their players, creators, and culture at large. And we'll get to a more personal kind of meaning making as we seek to use this art form ourselves. Just like most of us are unaware of the depth of games to begin with, we also tend to assume that they are only made by companies of coders. But as with other media, local, small scale game creation is a vibrant, available form of cultural production that we can join in with today. Think zines. To accomplish all this, we'll play some games, analyze others, read about making and taking apart games, both in terms of design and in how they try to accomplish their personal and social purposes. And most importantly, you'll work both on your own and as part of a small team to make games that have something to say to their players.

We'll pay special attention to digital games, but we won't leave out other formats; board games and the kinds of games that aren't often played for fun (math class) are, after all, still games. The theory is the same, and it's pretty validating to create your own automaton, especially if you never imagined yourself doing something like making a game. In the end, for your major design project, you'll be free to pick the kind of game that you want to make, the best form for the experience you'd like to create for your players. To be clear, we make no assumptions about your experience with games, code, or anything else. Come as you are and come ready to play and get your hands dirty!

Texts

I.’ve annotated these titles to give some insight into them for those coming from afar.

Games, Design and Play by Macklin and Sharp - an introduction to game design by professors at Parsons School of Design. Lots of examples of games big and small, from near and far, classic and recent, how they work to create meaning for their players and how the reader can join in. Helps to reorient discussion of art to mean something more than “pretty to look at”.

The Well-played Game by Bernie deKoven - the underground classic, intended more for PE teachers and camp counselors when it was first written but a now universally beloved examination about what it means to play together and to work to create that play.

How to Do Things with Videogames by Ian Bogost - Boost makes the complex simple, dividing the multifarious impacts of games worldwide into easily digestible verbs and no nonsense examples and analyses.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy - a manifesto for why we should make games for ourselves and each other, not just leaving it to the pros.

Extra Credits (Youtube series) - more than 200 episodes, each examining games from within the mainstream profession, considering issues of design, meaning making, and broader cultural aspects of gaming. A quick way to acclimate to the history of a million conversations.

People Make Games (YouTube series) - Investigative journalism into the videogame industry and explorations of game creation and play in a broader global context.

Some of the games we might play. I’ll try to pick games that are interesting but hopefully stop short of triggering. Games like That Dragon Cancer are moving but not something I’d push someone to suffer through themselves. The first lesson about the power of games is that the worst game in the world is one someone else makes you play. We will be looking for games of diverse authorship, both within the US and abroad, and of diverse purpose, to try and broaden our experiences of how this medium has evolved and is used. But we also need to care for each other in picking mountains that can be clomb in the time and space we have. A lot of games take far longer to play than students expect homework to be. A lot of games are expensive or require specialized hardware. A lot of games require a lot of manual dexterity and genre knowledge to play and appreciate. Some of the games that might be interesting to read about may be outside our purview of play. But there’s plenty too that will be accessible enough for us to try. Which exact titles will depend on who shows up and what’s going on that year, but here are some likely suspects.

Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope - an avant garde yet totally enjoyable mystery set about a doomed East Indian ship. A pallet cleanser for those who’ve mostly played Mario and recent multiplayer shooters.

Kisima Ingitchuna (I am not alone) - a puzzle-platform game based on a traditional Innupiaq tale, Kunuuksaayuka. The Cook Inlet tribal Council collaborated with Upper One Games studio to make the game. The game includes culturally relevant documentary along with the gameplay inspired by the tale.

Umarangi Generation by Origami Digital - Umarangi is the Te Reo word for Red Sky, an indigenous made game where you are a fashion photographer.

Unitled Goose Game by House House - Geese can be a**holes. Imagine how fun it is to be one for a bit. This game isn’t a polemic, but does a great job of showing the power of games to help us inhabit another soul, to provide us with a new perspective.

Flower and Journey by thatgamecompany - some of the first games brought up when big A Art enters the conversation. These are not only games but living studies of concepts of interaction between people and systems and people with each other, the utility and difficulty of aiming to design interaction.

Fez by Polygon corporation - a fun little indie game with marshmallow graphics from the beginning of the commercial indie boom. Simultaneously a cautionary tale about what it means to create publicly in the age of the internet.

Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz, et al. Someone took Nick Bostrom’s philosophical essay about the terrors of AI from 2002 and made a game for your browser where you can not only feel, but unwittingly bring about that dystopia yourself.

Undertale by Toby Fox - At least three good conversations here: 1) The retro aesthetic style, nostalgia and broader theory 2) What assumptions about agency and action do we bring to games and do they embed or reinforce 3) Games as an evolving conversation between their author and the fan base.

What remains of Edith Finch by Gaint Sparrow - A touching game that asks whether you can go home again, through the eyes of a protagonist who reminds us how limited our characters often are in mainstream games, and that allows us to see how writing and gameplay can work together to reinforce the themes of the authors

Requirements

Active participation in and preparation for seminar and online discussions A major team-based design project 1–2 smaller individual game designs Play a handful of videogames (we will make sure titles/platforms are within monetary/experiential bounds for all students) Read/watch about games and game design Write short reflections/analytical exercises/critiques of game projects Lead class discussions twice during the semester

About the Instructor(s): Christopher Holden

Chris Holden, originally from ABQ, has been a professor in Honors since 2008. He is a mathematician (PhD, Number Theory, U.Wisconsin-Madison) and his research centers on issues of learning, place and games (not math). He has affiliate appointments in both the Organizational and Information Learning Sciences and the Educational Linguistics programs. He's helped make games about everything from language to history to science in contexts that range from the classroom to museums to the outside world. Learning about games has helped him to recover and understand the central role learning plays in our lives, in and outside school. He is also the Scholars Wing faculty advisor so you can find him in Hokona too where he goes by the moniker Dr. C