Course Description
Exploratory Game Design Course Home
This course explores the process of creating experimental playful interactions through readings and playings, discussion, and several prototyping projects. Students will expand their horizon through a broad range of examples pushing the boundaries of current design, and learn how to engage in design research, prototyping, presentation and reflection to identify, explore, and validate the potential of novel design spaces by creating experimental playful interactions on their own.
The course is organized into three units, each covering one space for transcending current design standards: formal (game mechanics, genres, themes), social (gaming norms, rules, conventions), and spatial (context, location and setting of the game). Each unit entails readings, “homeplay” of exemplary experimental interactions, groupwork in modding existing games. A fourth unit will take up the last month of classes and give you time to focus on and apply what you have learned in a group project creating an original game.
As a framework for each unit we will be employing the idea of a “Designer’s Toolkit,” formally incorporating core practices of the concept development process. In addition, the insights that build on one another from each unit will culminate in the semester-spanning finals group project. For each of the four projects your group will deliver, you will explore and hone your skills in each of the following steps:
- Researching Design: how to research to inspire and inform design
- Brainstorming Design: how to create and filter design ideas
- Pitching Design: how to present design ideas in a clear and compelling form
- Documenting Design: how to document design ideas, decisions, and changes
- Prototyping Design: how to rapidly create and test prototypes to evaluate the promise of an idea, clarify a risk or unknown, or explore a possibility space
- Demoing Design: how to make a compelling project description and demo video
- Critiquing Design: how to give and receive design critique
