Course Overview Most fields of study have been around for thousands of years. Game design has been studied for not much more than ten. We do not have a vast body of work to draw upon, compared to those in most other arts and sciences. On the other hand, we are lucky. Within the past few years, we have finally reached what I see as a critical mass of conceptual writing, formal analysis, and theoretical and practical understanding to be able to fill a college curriculum… or at least, in this case, a high school elective. Okay, that isn’t entirely fair. There is actually a huge body of material in the field of game design, and many books (with more being released at an alarming rate). But the vast majority of it is either useless, or it is such dense reading that no one in the field bothers to read it. The readings we’ll have in this course are those that have, for whatever reason, pervaded the industry; many professional designers are already familiar with them. This course will be divided, roughly, into two parts. The first half of the course will focus on the theories and concepts of game design. We will learn what a game is, how to break the concept of a game down into its component parts, and what makes one game better or worse than another. In the second half of the course, the main focus is the practical aspect of how to create a good game out of nothing, and the processes that are involved in creating your own games. Throughout all of the course, there will be a number of opportunities to make your own games (all non-digital, no computer programming required), so that you can see how the theory actually works in practice. Game Design Concepts by Ian Schreiber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. |
