International Game Developers Association

Game Design as a Cultural Practice

Games Education
Course

Contents 1 Teachers 1.1 Instructors 2 Course Background Information 2.1 Location 2.2 Classification 3 Course Structure 3.1 Course description 3.2 Week by week topics 4 Course Materials & Facilities Used 5 Analysis of learning methods 5.1 What worked 5.2 What didn't work

Teachers

Instructors

• Janet Murray

Course Background Information

Location

Georgia Tech

Classification

See: Areas for classifing for your course.

Primary classification: Game Studies

Course Structure

Course description

This seminar is open to both advanced undergraduates (LCC 4725, with instructor’s permission) and graduate students (LCC 6215). The focus is on games as cultural artifacts and on the structural and representational elements of game design, especially electronic games. A guiding text will be Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, which examines several rhetorics of play, emphasizing the complexity of play as a biological, social, psychological, and cultural phenonomena. What function does playfulness serve in survival, mastery, creativity, adaptability? How does organized play reflect, subvert, reinforce cultural patterns? Do games provoke violence or do they divert it? Is enacting a role in a game more or less real than identifying with a character in a movie? What is the genealogy of games, from board games to electronic games? Is there a canon of games like a canon of musical or literary art? Are there "high" and "low" games? A second key text is Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s [[Rules of Play]]: Game Design Fundamentals which addresses game-making as a cultural activity similar to film-making to playwriting. Class discussions pair theoretical readings with close analysis of specific games, especially classics of key game genres and experimental games.? We will consider games in all media within the general context of the blossoming of electronic games as a major new art and entertainment genre over the past 30 years.

Students will give weekly reports on games and readings about games, and will present a final paper or project that is a significant work of game analysis or game design.

Week by week topics

1. Intro
2. Taxonomies of Play and Games, Board Games and Dice Games
3. Arcade Games: Mastery and Addiction
4. Adventure Mazes and Riddles
5. Quests
6. Catch-up week
7. Contests and Gore / Affiliation and Identity
8. Lab week
9. Lab week
10. Anti social Game Patterns
11. Games as Interactive Systems
12. PRELIMINARY PROJECT PRESENTATIONS

Course Materials & Facilities Used

Here you can link to and/or describe books and other materials you used for this course. Feel free to create new pages for each item here if a page for it does not yet exist.

Books

Main Required Texts:

• Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, The Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press (2004)
• Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play Cambridge MA: Harvard UP (2001)

Additional Required Reading : on electronic and physical reserve

• Roland Barthes, "Wrestling," in Mythologies (originally published 1957)
• G.Loftus & E. Loftus, Chapter 2 "Why Computer Games are Fun," The Mind at Play. NY: Basic Book, 1983
• Sherry Turkle, "Video Games and Computer Holding Power" Chapter 2 in The Second Self Simon and Shuster 1984 p. 64-Sherry Turkle "The Games People Play: Simulation and its Discontents" in Life on the Screen, pp 66-73

Additional Required Reading: on physical reserve

• Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash, University of Illiniois Press, 1961 (orig.1958) 1-3, 8
• David Partlett, The Oxford History of Board Games, Oxford U P, 1999, Chapters 1,2,7
• Richard Rouse III, Game Design: Theory and Practice. Plano, TX: Wordware 2001, chapters 4,7,8,20,22

Additional Required Reading: on the web

• Rick Adams, "The Origins of Adventure" (undated) available at http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html
• Tim Anderson,"History of Zork" part 1 and 2, originally in New Zork Times (1985) at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html
• Apollodorus , The Riddle of the Sphinx, as recounted in Apollodorus, Library 3.5.8 (2nd century B.C.) http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Apollod.+3.5.8
• Brothers Grimm, "Rumplestiltskin" in, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm?s Fairy Tales, originally published 1812, English version from Project Guttenberg available at ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext01/grimm10.txt
• Ted Friedman, "The Semiotics of Sim City," First Monday, vol. 4 issue 4, April 1999 available here: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_4/friedman/
• Martin Gardner, "The Fantastic Combinations of John Horton Conway's New Solitaire Game 'Life'," Scientific American (1970): 120-23. Available here: http://ddi.cs.uni-potsdam.de/HyFISCH/Produzieren/lis_projekt/proj_gamelife/ConwayScientificAmerican.htm
• Jeffrey Goldstein,: "Effects of Electronic Games on Children" (testimony to senate committee March 2000) available at http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/0321gol.pdf
• J. M. Graetz, "The Origin of Spacewar!," Creative Computing (1981). Available at http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html
• Homer, Odyssey Book IX (Cyclops Episode) available from the Perseus Project at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Hom.+Od.+9.82
• Henry Jenkins, Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces. In Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Combat Cambridge MA: MIT UP (1998) available on line at: http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/pub/complete.html
• P. David Lebling, Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson, "Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game," IEEE Computer 12 (April 1979): 51-59. Available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/ieee.html.
• Moira Muldoon, "The father of Mario and Zelda,"Salon Magazine, December 02, 1998, interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, available at http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/12/02feature.html
• Paul Starr, "Seductions of Sim: Policy as a Simulation Game," The American Prospect 17 (Spring 1994) 19-29 http://www.prospect.org/print/V5/17/starr-p.html

Assessment materials

e.g. tests, quizzes, assignment requirements, project requirements

Required Games

• Steve (Slug) Russel SPACEWAR! (1962) http://agents.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar
• Moru Iwatani, PacMan (1980)
• Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris (1985)
• Ed Long with Donna Baily. Centripede (1981)
• Solitaire (choose your poison!)
• Willie Crowther and Don Woods Adventure (1975): online at
• Colossal Cave Adventure: http://www.rickadams.org/adventure (Crowther and Woods)
• Timothy A. Anderson, Marc S. Blank, Bruce Daniels, and P. David Lebling, Zork (text adventure game, 1977) available at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/
• John Conway's Game of Life (various implements on line )
• Shigaru Miyamoto, Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo (1986)
• Ed Boon, John Tobias, Mortal Kombat Acclaim (1993)
• Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto (2001)
• John Romero, John Carmack, Doom. Id Software (1994)
• Warren Spector (lead designer), Deus Ex , Ion Storm (2000)
• Verant (SONY), Everquest (2000) (optional)
• Sid Meier, Civilization original version, Maxis Software (1991)
• Will Wright, SimCity original version, Maxis Software (1989)
• Will Wright, The Sims, Maxis Software (2001)

Case studies

(link to each file's storage location) or each respective wiki page

Tutorial files

(link to each file's storage location)

Other materials

(link to an uploaded resources -- e.g. research papers -- or external storage location)

Analysis of learning methods

What worked

Please discuss what techniques worked well

What didn't work

Please discuss what techniques didn’t work as well as you had hoped

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