UHON 401-004
Fall 2017
Tuesdays and Thursdays 2-3:15
Christopher Holden
Associate Professor
UNM Honors College
SHC 12
This course is about making videogames for mobile devices to better understand local place. You may think this takes programming skills and lots of money. But thanks to some easy-to-use tools, including ARIS which I help design, normal people can do this too. If game design sounds interesting but out-of-reach, this might be the class for you. Go check out ARIS now.
There’s more here. You don’t need wait for this class to start making games.
Another reason to sign up is to know more about this city and connect to it in a new way. This course is about finding what’s hidden in ABQ and making it visible. Games may sound like a funny way to know a place, but there are natural advantages. To make a game about a place or issue, you need to know that thing deeply and from a variety of perspectives, and you need to know how to make it interesting to someone else. Here are a couple videos that may give you a better idea why games?
- Jane McGonigal Games can make a better world
- Kurt Squire How Video Games Can Encourage Civic Engagement
Using mobile games to explore place, sometimes called augmented reality (AR), isn’t exactly a new idea, but it’s new enough. This field has not yet seen its Einsteins, Eisensteins, Shakespeares, Curies, or Kubriks. With a good idea, hard work, and some luck, you could be the first genius of AR. You can see some of the ideas that past students have tried here, here, and here. There are also many past and ongoing projects from outside this class here in ABQ. You can find out about them here. Beyond the limitless possibilities of a new medium, there are groups on campus and across the world who are looking for AR game designers help them connect people to places and ideas.
Not everything is a game, but games give us a good language for creating interesting experiences. In this course, we will learn about and practice game design. We’ll go outside the classroom and into the community. And the next time you are looking for a way to recruit participation in any endeavor, you’ll look back to those experiences and find something useful.
