Assignments and Grading

Major Assignment – Your Local Games Project

Your work this semester all feeds into one major team project, essentially to make a local game for/in/about Burque. What you make may not end up actually being a game as we usually think of them. It should maintain a strong connection to local place. The research that goes into it, its development, or use should tie very closely to the city we live in. There is some pressure for the context to not be limited to just the University, but exceptions may be made. You design may be more ambitious than can be completed in a single semester. In fact, it is a desirable outcome for your work here to lead to continued work after the semester is over. part of the design process will be to articulate what can and should be accomplished as part of your working prototype and what will only be described as part of the final design.

Supporting your design, and helping to make this articulation a natural part of your work, you will create auxiliary documents as part of your teamwork and as explicit artifacts of reflection. The first two are working documents that are actually part of your project, just not the part your users would see:

Design Board
Design Docs

Design Board

The design board is the record of your work and decisions. It’s how you keep working even though you might not all be able to meet in person during the week in between classes. If you’re still unclear on the concept or how to make, use, or share a design board, read this.

Design Docs

Your design docs can take many forms. You can look in Chapter 24 of [Schell][schell] or search the internet for ideas for yours. An easy default would be a Google doc. This should be the scaffold around your construction site, the bit that holds up your design while you are working on it. For example, you don’t want all of your game text to only live in ARIS. It is hard to see and reflect on there. I should be able to look at it to help understand the details of your design to give good feedback.

The latter two are reflective and creative in their own ways. They are two very different formats for representing your creative work and for asking for further support.

A Project Proposal
A “Kickstarter” Page

Project proposal

This is a formal paper submission, derived from the Games Learning and Society annual conference template. Your work this semester is aligned with the values of the conference in many ways. When I make games that involve place and/or learning, this is often the place I’m hoping to later talk about them. In addition to simplifying the format a bit from what the conference actually uses, I added a section on content to give you a suggested outline and major sections for the paper. You don’t have to follow this but it might be easiest. Each section has some leading questions. You don’t need to directly answer them—they are supposed to help describe the purpose of the section to you.

This proposal (minus the post mortem and discussion sections) will be first due in Week 13. After feedback, a final version will be due at the end of the semester. This will include revisions and the additional sections.

The purpose of this artifact is for you to practice the skills of academic writing, even the stupid parts (see that part about endnotes), to practice analytic and critical thinking within a specific domain, and to reflect on the creative work that you’re engaged in. Probably no one else other than me will ever read it, but the practice will hopefully help for the next time you need to do writing like this, and maybe the forced, careful reflection will help you think through your project too, presenting new insights in time to show in your final showcase. At least that’s what critical thinking and analysis are supposed to be good for.

Here’s the template.

Notice that unlike our work so far in Markdown, this is a Word doc. Despite its drawbacks, Word is still the lingua franca of official submissions at least in my neck of the woods. Most people I know write in some other software/format that is actually nice to write in and then export to Word when they are done and there match the formatting guidelines.

“Kickstarter” Page

This is a showcase of your design, modeled after Kickstarter. My hope is that we can excerpt just these to our course website to show to the world after class is over. Hopefully these will be read by others. It is an advertisement for your cool ideas and hard work.

I also created a common template for the “Kickstarter”.

You go ahead and do the Markdown following our usual guidelines for posting (draftin and Slack). I’ll put something quick and dirty together really quick and then copy the Markdown from Draftin to get it on the course web page and video links turned into embedded videos (volunteers are welcome to do this part for me).

The “Kickstarter” page will also be due in rough form by Week 15 (so the people we invite to our showcase can see what to expect). You will have time to make revisions and turn in a final version by the end of the semester.

Minor Assignments

Along the way, there are many small assignments. Most are clearly listed in our schedule, a few may get changed or added as we dig in. You will have appropriate warning. They are all designed to help prepare you and the other students for your game projects. Our “readings”, follow ups, and small design activities will help you to begin to build background in the thinking and actions necessary to make local games, and will help bring us together as a group of people pursuing a common goal…at least if these assignments are done in good faith.

Each assignment is made up of two pieces, one experiential, one reflective. For example, you may be asked to read a chapter in a book. You then typically have a responsibility to do something with that writing besides run your eyes over the print. Often you will be asked to summarize the writing and draw out some important ideas for further research and reflection. These short writing assignments will be shared with the whole class so that we can together cover more ground than would be possible otherwise. Even if it is not explicitly scheduled, there will be both online and in class mechanisms for discussing what we are becoming interested in. You are responsible for playing an active role in these activities.

It is also assumed that your curiosity extends beyond the assigned activities. What we have scheduled is enough to get everyone a bit interested and on the same page. To allow you to develop and pursue your own deep interests, the “readings” and other small assignments are kept to a minimum with the expectation that you will invent for yourself additional opportunities and share reflections on your independent experiences in similar ways to the assignments. For example:

This course is about the city. Rather than take a field trip to every location that might be important to someone, you will need to organize outings on your own. It’s hard to imagine saying you’ve explored the city over sixteen weeks without going to at least three new places, trying a new form of experiencing a place you already know (eg. through a different mode of transport, or through a new cognitive lens). Some of our small assignments will give you a ready opportunity for independent exploration, but you should also look for your own opportunities and publicly reflect on what you find.

The “readings” are the tip of icebergs. we will build a bit of background among the various themes relevant to local game design, including

What is place?
Issues and themes in our city
The university as a place
Urban and wilderness ecologies
Games – what they are and how they work
Games – what they’re good for
How to think about technology
The affordances and ecologies of Mobile technology
Augmented reality
Design (tools, process, and intent)
Dissemination (i.e. how to share and what it means)

These are of course large topics we do not have the time to fully comprehend. Our goal in studying them briefly is not to acquire content but to begin to see the landscape before us and inform our designs. As your designs emerge later in the semester, the groundwork you do here will help suggest further study as it is relevant.

You need to play games to make games. We have not scheduled much time to play games this semester. However, you may not have played many games recently. Or maybe all you play is Call of Duty. Videogames and boardgames are a vibrant art form currently. There is a great variety in the games that are being put out there. While it is impossible and pointless to keep up with all of them, you have the privilege of being here on earth as this is happening. It’s like Jazz in the ’50’s. Broaden your palettes and take the time to explore. Remember these two things:

You wouldn’t set out to make a movie without ever having seen one, thinking they are a waste of time, or not for you.
Games require active participation. You can’t know much about one without playing it, often for many hours.

Despite the lack of scheduled assignments involving gameplay, we will make room in our online spaces and general discussions to be informed by your new experiences with games. Also, since our first scheduled lesson is about righteous stealing, you should think about looking into other games as research.

Grades

In Honors, we have a three point grading system: A, CR, NC. At this point you are likely familiar with it and that its implementation and description may differ from teacher to teacher. At the same time, you are also likely aware that with only three points to decide between, it is usually clear where the chips fall and what each grade represents regardless of teacher:

A – Excellent. There is one or more aspects of your work that is extraordinary.
CR – You showed up and did the work to a satisfactory level. Simply filling a seat and completing assignments is enough but will do you no better.
NC – There is a significant missing or insufficient component of your work.

Describing excellence in the creation of local games also takes a few words. It is a new activity, and what is good is still in flux. That’s what makes it an exciting place to work. As your judge, it also means I am open to many kinds of excellence—product and process—that can go into a game project. Some examples:

A project whose background and proposal for action is particularly well-thought out and researched, usually clear from their supporting materials
A game that inspires a million dollar grant (this actually happened!)
A game whose research and design involved the team really getting involved in their local community
A game that people actually want to play (the holy grail)
A game that actually gets played by its target audience, and that play is studied
A project whose process involves particularly effective teamwork (usually evidenced by what me and other students see of your collaborations and presentations, and an even, high quality across all produced materials – everything is done and looks polished because each person had something important to do and they did it well).
A project whose design actually involved community members, not just classmates, in a material way.
A project whose documentation serves affinity spaces outside the classroom (blogs detailing the use of software, demonstrating a design mechanic, etc.).

Briefly, those students whose curiosity and gumption are obvious in their work, who get things done and work well with others, who can speak well but also listen, these people have nothing to worry about with their grades.

On the other end, apathy is not tolerated. There’s no reason to take this course unless it actually interests you and you are willing to make that interest manifest in action.

I will provide you with qualitative feedback on small assignments. You may be asked to revise some work if it is not up to expectations. As your projects get under way, there are many scheduled opportunities for feedback and to make expectations clear. When I turn in grades, your letter grade will also be accompanied by a narrative statement of your performance this semester that led to your letter grade.

I am also always happy to provide additional feedback or make specific comments about your current standing and what you need to do better on a case by case basis, in person or in writing.